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Mass spectrometry instrumentation continues to evolve rapidly, yet quantifying these advances beyond conventional peptide and protein detections remains challenging. Here, we evaluate a modified Orbitrap Astral Zoom mass spectrometer (MS) prototype and compare its performance to the standard Orbitrap Astral MS. Across a range of acquisition methods and sample inputs, the prototype instrument outperformed the standard Orbitrap Astral MS in precursor and protein identifications, ion beam utilization, and quantitative precision. To enable meaningful cross-platform comparisons, we implemented an ion calibration framework that converts signal intensity from arbitrary units to ions per second. This benchmarking strategy showed that the prototype sampled 23.1% more ions per peptide than the original Orbitrap Astral MS. This increase in the ion beam utilization resulted in improved sensitivity and quantitative precision. To make these metrics broadly accessible, we added new metrics to the Skyline document grid to report the number of ions measured in a spectrum at the apex of the elution peak or the sum of ions between the peak integration boundaries. Taken together, our results demonstrate the Orbitrap Astral Zoom prototype as a high-performance platform for data-independent acquisition proteomics and establish a generalizable framework for evaluation of MS performance based on the number of ions detected for each analyte. Data are available on Panorama Public and ProteomeXchange under the identifier PXD064536.
Hsu et al. (Wed,) studied this question.