Analytical chemists are accustomed to using computer technology to search the web for reference material, to e-mail colleagues and to co-author papers by exchanging files online, according to Murray Johnston, professor of chemistry and biochemistry.

By contrast, Johnston says, the one place chemists often are not electronically connected is in their laboratories.

He and colleagues addressed this issue through an Internet-based "collaboratory" in which a mass spectrometer in Johnston's campus lab was used in a research project with colleagues from George Washington and Drexel universities. Instead of coming to UD to collaborate, the other researchers ran their experiments long-distance from their home offices.

The project was sparked by a National Science Foundation chemical research instrumentation grant that provided funds for a MALDI-TOF mass spectrometer to be installed in Lammot du Pont Lab in 1999. The instrument is used to analyze samples of proteins, DNA, synthetic polymers and other complex materials.

In the remote experimentation project, a researcher at another university sends a sample he or she wants analyzed to the UD lab, where the material is prepared, placed on a special metal plate and inserted into the mass spectrometer.

While the instrument does its work, the scientists can log on to the Internet from their off-campus locations and watch the analysis on two computer screens--one showing a video of the analysis process itself and the other showing the data being generated. They even can control how the instrument operates.

Johnston and his colleagues wrote about the first year of the project in the American Chemical Society journal, Analytical Chemistry. They predicted that the process will become increasingly common.

"The approach we have adopted for remote experimentation is easy to implement, effective and applicable to a wide range of analytical instrumentation," they wrote.

More recently, Johnston's research group has installed mass spectrometers at federal Environmental Protection Agency measurement sites in Baltimore and Pittsburgh to analyze microscopic particles in polluted air. From their offices in Lammot du Pont Lab, the UD researchers have operated these instruments remotely, analyzing more than 600,000 airborne particles in the two cities.