Clinical MALDI mass spectrometry for tuberculosis diagnostics: Speculating the methodological blueprint and contemplating the obligation to improvise

MALDI MS with its long history in clinical analysis, is a vital tool, well known for its versatility, rapidity and implementation ease. In tuberculosis research, MALDI has outstanding contributions on the pathogen detection aspect as well as disease diagnosis prospect. This article reviews the existing methods and achievements made employing MALDI MS in tuberculosis research. The challenges confronting and limiting MALDI MS based tuberculosis analysis are presented. An interesting yet intriguing lacuna is that almost none of the state-of-art MALDI MS variants, such as DIOS, NIMS, NALDI, NAPA have been implicated into MALDI based tuberculosis research. These nanoplatforms holding fabulous claims for pushing the limits of detection and avoiding matrix interferences, enhanced resolution, being kept away from this research arena is disturbing and is called to notice through this review. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.