I had the best idea ever - I did not stay out for a really fun punk rock band in Provo and, instead, went straight to bed, got up hella early, packed and crashed the iSCMS (hands on single cell proteomics workshops for a couple hours before driving the very highest legal speeds to the airport to get on my plane just in time.
Imagine that you have read a bunch of papers on single cell proteomics but you still didn't get the magic behind it. iSCMS arranged rotating groups of demos where you could see these processes or even get hands on with things....like LEVCELL!
Nikolai Slavov got there when I did so he got stuck in my group, and here he is loading droplets into the LevCell.
You might have to zoom to see them but this is after our group got done loading ours. How sick is that. The sonic fields just sort of ...feel...right...?...as you're putting the droplets into the correct space. Gao lab is very close to having all the stuff together to release these plans to the community!
There were also Tecan UNO demos that were very thorough (top panel). More on this soon, I figure since we'll be running cells on ours this week, and CellenOne sent THE Joshua Cantlon himself for live demonstrations on the mighty CellenOne system.
You know the double trap elute system the Kelly lab developed for ultralow flow on the regular Dionex nano systems? Woooooweeeeee!
It's even more intimidating than in the diagrams in the paper! But it makes sense when you see it and the diagrams side by side. They're working on making it more easy for others to adopt. Stay tuned, I think.
On the LC topic -- and this was a big point of Vici's talk -- if we're going ultra low flow, we might need to start thinking hard about whether the relatively huge 1/16th fittings make sense. All of the HPLCs used for single cell that I saw had this much much smaller plumbing systems. There were hands on demos on how to swap those out and how to work with these smaller fittings!
On the instrument side, we know Kelly lab/BYU is vendor agnostic. I saw a 480, Lumos, the big high end Agilent and I finally got hands on with an Ultra and have a better idea of what makes it special.
Bonus tour point - I've never actually seend a laser capture microdissection thing before and Ryan gave us a personal tour of his equipment!
There were other stops on this tour with great Q/A, cool people to interact with, lunch and then afternoon sessions, but - again - I had to get to SLC at very legal speeds to get home.
Again, just stellar stuff. I took a ton of notes and I swear sometimes you just have to see the things up close or ask 10 stupid questions (that's probably just me) to finally understand just get it. Super cool stuff and I sincerely hope that there is something like this at iSCMS 2024!