Common species that isotope markers are used for include proteins. In this case, amino acids with stable isotopes of either carbon, nitrogen, or hydrogen are incorporated into polypeptide sequences. These polypeptides are then put through mass spectrometry. Because of the exact defined change that these isotopes incur on the peptides, it is possible to tell through the spectrometry graph which peptides contained the isotopes. By doing so, one can extract the protein of interest from several others in a group. Isotopic compounds play an important role as photochromes, described below.