Comparison of unit resolution versus high-resolution accurate mass for parallel reaction monitoring

Parallel reaction monitoring (PRM) is an increasingly popular alternative to selected reaction monitoring (SRM) for targeted proteomics. PRM’s strengths over SRM are that it monitors all product ions in a single spectrum, thus eliminating the need to select interference-free product ions prior to data acquisition, and that it is most frequently performed on high-resolution instruments, such as quadrupole-orbitrap and quadrupole-time of flight instruments. Here, we show that the primary advantage of PRM is the ability to monitor all transitions in parallel, and that high-resolution data are not necessary to obtain high quality quantitative data. We run the same scheduled PRM assay, measuring 432 peptides from 126 plasma proteins, multiple times on a Orbitrap Eclipse Tribrid mass spectrometer, alternating separate liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry runs between the high resolution Orbitrap and the unit resolution linear ion trap for PRM. We find that both mass analyzers have similar technical precision, and that the linear ion trap’s superior sensitivity gives it better lower limits of quantitation on over 62% of peptides in the assay.