Wooo..what a month so far! This will need to be brief, but I FINALLY got to attend the single cell proteomics conference at NorthEastern, and I even got to ramble about why I'm doing SCP.
For a full list of the speakers and topics, check out the main meeting website here. Many of the full talks will go live I'm sure as soon as people get caught up from their packed June schedules.
Don't be deceived by this picture, this meeting was paaacked and big numbers of people were tuned in remotely whenever we saw the zoom screen between talks.
I've got to move sort of fast, but here were some main highlights for me.
Meni Wanunu (who might have the best name to try and say 3 times fast) really broke down where other technologies are tody for getting to single cell or single protein sequencing. My interpretation -- we don't have much to fear from them in the forseeable future.
Two versions of nanopore are working, one in which the regular old nanopore is adapted for proteins. At this point in time no one has successfully pulled off more than a small tryptic peptide. The second type actually binds the protein to an oligonucleotide string and the protein gets "ratcheted" through the pore as the oligo gets through. This seems super promising until you think about the detector....which is current based....so now you've got the current shift from the nucleotide coming out of the pore (which has an error bar on it AND you've got the current shift from the amino acid coming through (which has an error bar AND a 20 different possibilities). The best anyone has been able to show is that they can pretty much get every amino acid that comes through to 1 of 3 possibilities. I bet after 30 get through you could say #1 is A,E or N and #2 is E,T or D and #3 is L(I),I(L), or P and so on and eventually figure out exactly what that sequence probably is. Which is probably better in some ways than where things were when Don Hunt was doing stuff in the 1980s with mass specs....?
The ending estimate was that current technology with 1 million nanopores could completely read about 1 billion amino acids (one cell worth, give or take an order of magnitude) in about 24 hours. So...I bet that's enough to raise an easy 10 billion dollars on a technology that probably won't catch up before I retire.
Erwin Schoof and Ryan Kelly were excellent of course, and they dropped some very small hints about an Orbi TOF (or Orbi - HOOET, or whatever) that was about to come out at ASMS.
Neil Kelleher showed a DESI based single cell profiling technology FOR TOP DOWN SINGLE CELL at thousands of cells per day. Link here. Crazy.
The biologists sort of stole the show, though. Sabrina Spencer at UC Boulder demonstrated live cell imaging and how her team has been working out how cell cycle really works (at the protein level) and Kristin Burnum-Johnson (PNNL, and you could argue also big time mass spectrometrist) demonstrated spatial profiling to study super complex multi-organism systems to find important metabolic enzymes for biofuel production. Super innovative stuff I'd never ever seen before. I don't think what she described has been published yet, but I'll be on the lookout for it.
Gotta move to the next project, but again super glad I got to finally attend this great meeting and see some of what is going on in this amazingly innovative space.
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