This is the first time ABRF has happened in a city that I live in! Man, once upon a time there were so many proteomics people that we had competing initiatives. We were standardizing methods and standardizing standards and comparing software and it was all a lot of fun and it all kind of stopped. But you know what you can talk about anywhere you want to?
Single Cell Proteomics! Dr. Kyle Swovick, photo taken from the front row, organized a session and, for a small conference with 3 competing sessions at a meeting with sessions with riveting titles like "asset management" I'd call it a hit. Definitely better attendance than last year's session I organized that was called "Yo, Justin Walley and I are totally going to do SCP in core facilities, hold our beers". This was sort of a victory lap for me because we now have paying customers in our core at Pitt for SCP and the first data delivered received this response, that I don't mind at all.
Kyle's core at Rochester also does it! It's a real thing! Kyle talked about what a pain in the butt it was to reproduce methods from the literature that largely forgot important details and I called the authors of a preprint that said "5,000 proteins per cell" in the title "a bunch of assholes" on video for a second year in a row!
And we had great questions and interactions.
Was that all the proteomics? Nope! It sure wasn't!
Someone who isn't an ABRF member nominated John Yates for the lifetime achievement in BioAnalysis award, and they were like "wait. didn't we give that to him 15 years ago? Holy shit. Why haven't we given him this award already??" So they did.
And I got to be like 4 rows back for John's history of protein mass spectrometry. Super funny with xeroxes of papers (younger scientists, we used to go to the library and find papers in actual journals and photocopy them) and a lot of self-effacing humor and reflection. And cuttings from papers of the past that seem either predictive or ridiculous in the context of today. Or both.
Super fun thing I was very glad to catch.
The rest of ABRF? Hmmm....there are some cool new LCM solutions I'm investigating, and some cell sorters. And a great convention center!
Maybe I'll write more about it when it's over.
As an aside -
Conference travel in the US is really really hard right now. Last weekend at BWI TSA screening was taking over 5 (FIVE) hours. I've flown out of BWI easily 300 times in my life. It's a small airport. 30 minutes is a big deal for TSA there. I agreed to speak at an awesome university a 7.5 hour drive from my house. And I don't think I can get there faster in a plane right now, but it'll cost me about the same in gasoline. ...yaaay...
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