The original DigestPro with 30 sample capacity has been originally developed by Abimed in Germany in collaboration with Dr. Keith Ashman in the group of Matthias Mann at the EMBL in Heidelberg. It was the first commercial automated protein digester. Abimed also developed a 96 well version of the instrument which was marketed as ProGest by Genomic Solutions in their own cabinet and as DigestPro 96 by Abimed. In 2000 INTAVIS acquired all rights to the Abimed instruments and continued sales and development. The DigestPro MS introduced in 2003 was a new platform combining digestion and MALDI sample preparation in a 96 well format for medium throughput requirements. It uses the same valveless flow-through reaction vessels which have become state of the art in automated protein digestion.
Enzymatic digestion of proteins in polyacrylamide gel slices and subsequent analysis of the peptides by mass spectrometry has become a routine procedure in protein analysis. The DigestPro MS automates this procedure to achieve high throughput under controlled and reproducible conditions.
