Akos Vertes research interests encompass the development of new analytical techniques applicable in diverse fields of chemistry, biology, and medicine. Research areas include high throughput and ultrasensitive methods in systems biology, proteomics and metabolomics, new methods for molecular imaging of biological tissues, and single cell and subcellular analysis. One of his major accomplishments, a new ionization method called laser ablation electrospray ionization (LAESI), received several awards, including a “Top 10 Innovations of 2011” award from The Scientist magazine, and a “2012 R&D 100 Award” from the R&D Magazine. A current project in his laboratory, funded by the DOE Biological and Environmental Research program and the NSF Plant Genome Research Program, aims to develop an in situ molecular microscope based on the combination of the next generation LAESI ion source and the unique 21 Tesla FT-ICR mass spectrometer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) to study biological nitrogen fixation at single cell resolution. His research has been presented in over 180 peer-reviewed publications (h = 45), and in two books. He is a co-inventor on 17 patents and several pending patent applications. He was elected Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors and received the 2012 Hillebrand Prize and the Oscar and Shoshana Trachtenberg Prize for Scholarship. He is a Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He served as Visiting Faculty at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and twice as a Visiting Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) in Switzerland. Currently, he is a Visiting Professor at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
S.A. Stopka, L. Samarah, J.B. Shaw, A.V. Liyu, D. Velickovic, B.J. Agtuca, C. Kukolj, D.W. Koppenaal, G. Stacey, L. Pasa-Tolic, C.R. Anderton, A. Vertes, “Ambient Metabolic Profiling and Imaging of Biological Samples with Ultrahigh Molecular Resolution using Laser Ablation Electrospray Ionization 21 Tesla FTICR Mass Spectrometry,” Anal. Chem., 2019, 91, 5028.
A.R. Korte, N.J. Morris, A. Vertes, “High Throughput Complementary Analysis and Quantitation of Metabolites by MALDI- and Silicon Nanopost Array-Laser Desorption/Ionization-Mass Spectrometry,” Anal. Chem., 2019, 91, 3951.
L. Zhang, N. Khattar, I. Kemenes, G. Kemenes, Z. Zrinyi, Z. Pirger, A. Vertes, “Subcellular Peptide Localization in Single Identified Neurons by Mass Spectrometry,” Sci. Rep., 2018, 8, 12227.
L. Zhang, A. Vertes, “Single‐Cell Mass Spectrometry Approaches to Explore Cellular Heterogeneity,” Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2018, 57, 4466.