I am fascinated how general principles can be used to solve complex problems in biology.

“Weighing” peptide ions in the gas phase is the principle behind mass spectrometry. Yet we employ mass specteometry-based proteomics to find significant changes in protein abundance and even structure. General concepts from data analysis and statistics enable processing of the resulting spectra and, using smart data visualisation, the large amount of resulting data is transformed to insightful figures. For me, computational approaches to proteomics data are one step on the way from experiment to knowledge.