Friday, June 27, 2025

Story that I thought was going to be real bad - turned out to be a great one!

 


Fun story (now!) 

Wednesday morning we had a super early recording for Season 7 of the Proteomics Show (thank you US HUPO!) it's called "Alt Proteomics" because "People who measure proteins in weird ways" was my suggestion and I swear everyone just ignored me. 

Actually - this just posted - it's a pre-ramble to the Season. Ben and I are getting WAY out of our comfort zones and asking smart people really dumb questions. Like (not joking) "so...is your 'lab' just a bunch of computer terminals into a super computer...?"


My AMAZING collaborators start calling. On Friday my "lab" is going outside of cancer cell lines and we have real human samples for single cell proteomics for the first time - and...it's not Friday..... I'm not technically a millenial (too old) but I embrace the sentiment that PHONE CALL = BAD STUFF 

And I was right. The cells were ready 2.5 days early. It was go now or have nothing.

My first hire here at Pitt was on his 7th day. I hadn't sent him the SCP protocol yet. We didn't have plates ready. I hadn't powered on our sorter in about a month, so he hadn't even seen it. Our cell counter was so new that I'd never even used it (you count nanoparticles in solution, and I'd done that). AND we had a Bruker field apps scientist on site doing instrument training.

Fortunately our on-site field Apps Scientist was Dr. Josh Beri. 


Yeah. This guy!  A Michael fucking Bereman (inside joke, I still miss that dude and the world was a cooler place when he was here) and Muddiman lab product. 

Our corporation's Field Apps Scientist jumped right into the trenches with us. He hadn't used my weird cell analyzer or our single cell sorter, but he obviously knows his shit, right? So we had an extra set of hands to analyze and count cells, buffer exchange them (not the term FACs people use), recount and reanalyze them, bust up clumps (real human cells are sticky, it's almost like they don't want to be a homogenous solution(? weird) isolate them, lyse them, digest them and run them.

And check this out! Now - it is a long held tradition in proteomics that you only show the best possible data, and I scrolled down to show injections 21-25 for that reason. And some of these cells are over 25um in diameter. Not small.  


This is Whisper40SPD Zoom on a Bruker 15cm column with 10um ZDV junction on the TIMSTOF Ultra2 (not AIP...yet...). There is a solid chance that cell 21 is a doublet or was going through mitosis, but the point here is that on Wednesday morning I thought I'd lost weeks of setup discussions and invaluable samples. And thanks a long couple of days of help from my vendor(??) I've got the best single cell data I've ever personally seen from myself or anyone else coming off my instrument right this second.

I sent a thank you out to every email address at Bruker that I had and they're going to send Josh back out so he can finish the interrupted training when my postdoc in onboard in a couple of weeks. 

Edit 7/1/2025 - This is part of the response I received from Dr. Michael Krawitzky at Bruker

"Glad we could help. Again we are trying to transform Bruker applications to become a trusted advisor in the lab and unofficial lab member."

(Possibly Josh's boss? Yo, maybe this is just some lip service, but I tell you what, when you convince people to drop this kind of money on an instrument it's sure a nice thing to feel like you aren't alone while trying to get evidence that they made the right investment in you and your program!)

No comments:

Post a Comment