HUPO 2019 Recap Part 2!

This is a continuation of the 2019 HUPO recap post (helpful if this awful blog is inserted into your newsfeed.)

What else did our HUPO spy let us in on?

Agent Steele:

1) Brian Searle was in attendance and provided another entry into how we should be doing DIA and in this instance has provided a way for us to knock enhance retention time accuracy and prediction via Prosit prediction. If you haven’t read the paper, I highly recommend it. “Generating high-quality libraries for DIA-MS with empirically-corrected peptide predictions”

(thank you for scaffold DIA as well)

(Ben: Totally off-topic, but I had to return my laptop that had the amazing sticker of Dr. Searle's head! Buuuummmer.  I hope there are some next ASMS!) 

2) In the field of quick analysis that used duct tape and power tools to develop. Phil Robinson’s (ProCan/CMRI) student Dylan Xavier has given us HEAT AND BEAT which is a one pot tissue sample preparation method that takes less than an hour! Which comes with efficacy against FFPE! On this Mathias was not present but his lab has offered a new entry into the FFPE analysis arena (HERE) but for those not having the ability to do laser micro dissection I think Dylan’s method is exactly what we are after for high throughput proteomics (Optimized ABLE).

3) The inaugural Australasian Core Facilities Satellite Meeting discussed all things pertaining to running core facilities headed by Ben Crosset and Ralf Schittenhelm. This was an excellent addition to the program and allowed all facility heads a space to discuss important issues and begin dialogues. (HUPO is the best springboard for regional facility collaboration)

(Ben: Yo...Australasian Core Facilities -- you should totally check out ABRF resources if you haven't to see if there are things that can help you, or ways we all can collaborate to make everything reproducible!) 

4) Michael Snyders plenary offered the biggest collaboration and cross-omics monitoring effort the world has ever seen! Big data and health taking precision medicine to a real world domain. In essence a baseline really needs to be established for an individual, this allows us an insight into disease pathogenesis and what future medicine will entail!

5) The moment of inhalation as Dr. Nicki Packer pointed out the elephant in the room (glycoproteomics!!) is now a routinely achievable analysis had a few of us frantically discussing how quickly we can employ this in the lab! Not to mention she used this blog as a sound board of exactly why we should all be doing it! 

Ben:

Joel has more notes, but this is a good stopping point for me for now and this will probably be the last "formal" recap. I've got more reading to do and more links to follow up on from what I've even posted here.

I'd like to send a huge thank you to Joel, and the rest of the Twitterverse for keeping me/us up to date with what happened at a conference I expected to be at.

If there is a way to wrap up everything I've read and heard from attendees it's this:

Proteomics is just getting started.
PTMs can't be ignored.
We've got to start thinking in terms of proteoforms --- assuming that what the mass spec is seeing is a literal interpretation of exactly that open reading frame is starting to look plain silly at this point.

Have we found all of the "easy" protein abundance stuff? No, but that is just scratching the surface of what we can do.

We're going to need to keep our minds flexible because the techniques we've gotten used to are not going to be the techniques we'll need tomorrow -- cause that disease or phenotype is gonna be an alternatively cleaved glycosylated version of that open reading frame that only our technologies can see, but if we don't fine tun our input and/or data processing we'll miss it.