Since its inception in 2005, the Coon Group has published over 50 papers. They are often among the highest cited papers in their respective journals in a given year and are cited a combined 731 times as of November 2010. Many of them are high profile publications demonstrating the utility of ETD for protein sequencing. These range from large-scale mapping of protein phosphorylation in human embryonic stem cells (~12,000 citations, PNAS, 2008), identifying sites of protein glycosylation (Nature Chemical Biology, 2007), to characterization and quantification of histone proteins in human embryonic stem cells (PNAS, 2008), among several others. Another intriguing feature of ETD fragmentation was discovered and reported by Coon et al. in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. In this work, we report that because ETD produces radical fragment ions (z•-type ion), these species have an even number of odd valence atoms, while all other fragment ion types (b-, c-, y-type) have an odd number of odd valence atoms. The rule, which Coon dubbed the valence parity rule, dictates that no z•-type ion shall have the same chemical composition, and by extension mass, as another fragment. This means that when ETD product ion masses are measured with high accuracy one can often identify the fragment ion peaks by mass alone. Such capability will propel multiple fields: (1) de novo sequence identification, (2) correcting genome annotation, (3) identification of single nucleotide polymorphisms, and (4) discovery RNA editing events at the protein level.

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