In the diagnosis of haemoglobinopathies, the routine procedure includes haemoglobin variant characterisation using alkaline gel electrophoresis and/or automated ion exchange HPLC. In both above methods, the differential migration and/or elution of tetrameric haemoglobin molecule is investigated to characterize the variant. Occasionally, co-migration/co-elution of haemoglobin variants and an abnormal elution profile results in ambiguity in the analysis. We are using a mass spectrometry based proteomics platform to provide an unambiguous analysis of the haemoglobin variants.