While the marriage of mass spectrometry and laser spectroscopy is not new, developments over the last few years in this relationship have opened up new horizons for the spectroscopic study of biological molecules.  The combination of electrospray ionisation for producing large biological molecules in the gas phase with cooled ion traps and multiple-resonance laser schemes are allowing spectroscopic investigation of individual conformers of peptides of increasing size.  Highly resolved infrared spectra of single conformations of such species provide important benchmarks for testing the accuracy of theoretical calculations.

This talk will give an overview of techniques employed in our laboratory for measuring conformer-selected vibrational spectroscopy of cold, gas-phase biomolecular ions of increasing size and complexity.  I will show examples that demonstrate the power of thse techniques and evaluate their extension to still larger biological molecules.