US HUPO Part 2?

 

There is often this slower than normal period in my brain after a conference as neurons try to pull some of the amazing and disparate facts together into something that can be used. I do wonder if some sort of ultra high resolution NMR would be able to see patterns that look like the dozens of pages of notes that I took in Charleston and will be typing up over the next few days. 

We got new instruments installed while I was gone and that HAS to be my first priority, but while the espresso cools here are quick impressions of USHUPO.

Overall impression 1: This is the conference where the biologically relevant stuff hangs out! There was an entire SESSION that addressed racial/genetic disparities in human diseases and how people like Lisa Jones and Peggi Angel have been trying to sort those out. I can't type about the work of either (you can get some hint of what Angel is working on by spying on recent submitted AACR abstracts like this one. There are huge disparities in some cancers, both in who gets them and who dies from them and the Angel team is studying it from several innovative angles.)

2: I mentioned this yesterday, but high n LCMS proteomics is coming. A lot of it is coming from (new?) small companies with innovative approaches to handle sample processing and who have tossed the classic 2 hour LC gradient out the window. While DIA appears to be central to most of these, it certainly isn't all of them. As one of a decreasing number of people who prefer the still narrower isolation widths of DDA experiments, it's good to see that I'm not alone. Multiple groups discussed cohorts of around one-thousand samples and a preprint dropped last week that I can not find this morning. 

3: The new proteomic technologies aren't afraid to show up at our meetings, but they might not get a lot of visitors. O-link was there. They looked kind of lonely whenever I went by, but my schedule was packed. 10x genomics demonstrated their new-ish transcript quan directly off a FFPE slice. 

4: Protein 3D structural stuff by mass spec isn't going away. On top of improvements in our classic approaches there was some really innovative new (to me) approaches for measuring protein 3D stability. If this is your jam, I strongly suggest you check out Chalf. I think there are some papers on the way that will show why you'll care about a flexible open pipeline for measuring protein complex or protein structural stability. 

5: And I know typing this will annoy people, but -- geez -- the last HUPO (international) I went to was 100% one mass spec vendor. Maybe that's an exaggeration. Let's go with 96% one vendor, one poster and two people from the Buck institute. Talk about a change in a couple of years. When you saw a picture of an instrument on a slide deck or a poster or a lightning, it might have been 50/50. Maybe 35/65 and that 65 was TOFs. 

My hope is that we are, as a field, about to reap similar dividends to the return of AMD to the central processor game a couple of years ago. Intel went most of a decade with no real competition. Sure, every year Intel would roll out slightly faster or more efficienty chips, but every year the difference seemed just a bit smaller. Do you transfer over for a "next generation" chip for an 8% increase in speed, battery life, or peptide IDs? Moving that hard drive over and figuring out where those F keys are now takes some time. AMD came back a couple of years ago with serious processing power and tech that Intel didn't have and it's been straight out competition between these two companies since. The winner? Us! The consumers! Hopefully this metaphor (analogy? I forget) holds, and bright times are ahead for a suddenly extremely competitive field right when the world is watching to see what proteomics can do. I'm optimistic.