Thermo marketing delivers another tour de force in how to sell million dollar mass spectrometers!

 

Okay - so let's totally focus on the positives. Whoever has been executing these marketing releases from Thermo in conjunction with instrument launches is absolutely undefeated. This is the 3rd or 4th year in a row? Right when Thermo drops a new instrument you get field leaders dropping 

Preprint

Preprint

Preprint (actually, this one is worth revisiting later)

Marketing white paper lightly disguised as a Preprint

Together this adds an absolute shit ton of credibility to every talk you see, even the ones you only went to for the admittedly extremely cool free Legos. 

While I'm clearly being a jerk because this does appear to be a marvelous instrument that will only run you 5- 7  brand new Porsche GT3s

At the end of the day even if the quan at 500SPD looks like complete garbage (I'm not saying it does, I'm saying, if it does). That's still WAY more identifications than you can get from a O-Link or the IlluminaProteinCrap at WAY higher throughput. 2-5x! 

Now - just to make it clear where things stand from a data quality perspective. I would bet my house that an Astral that is operated by a keyboard on the floor of a room full of boston terriers will undoubtedly provide better quantitative proteomic data than the Illumina proteomics solution. O-Link is putting in the work to both improve and prove that it can deliver quantitatively meaningful protein measurements. It's up to Illumina to upend 20+ years of aptamer based protein measurements to demonstrate -for the very first time - that aptamers can deliver meaningful quantitative protein measurements outside of an extremely narrow linear dynamic range. I've been wrong 6 times this morning already, maybe this'll be 7.  I don't think it will, but that would be 8. And I'm fine with that.