Multi-omics day on-site at Waters corporation!

 

Hey proteomics people! Did you know that Waters makes mass spectrometers? They totally do and, while I'm not at all sure how this happened, I got invited to drop in and meet scientists and see some talks and touch some instruments. 

I'm pretty sure I got to visit because of some impressive numbers out of the P10 instrument which looks like a compelling piece of proteomics hardware. I'm trying to talk them into running some dumb stuff on one of them for me. The day featured a small group of people with very different mass spectrometry interests getting to wander around the demo labs and touch things and see the Cyclic MS thing (that I know Padula has and likes, but I wasn't really sure what it was) and lift the MALDI and DESI sources that you can just move from one instrument to another. Which, I can't remember anyone else doing, but they were just sitting there.  

There were also fun customer talks from this guy https://info.liningtonlab.org/ at Simon Fraser. 

Did you know there was an effort to compile all identifications of all natural products on earth? And maybe if you had all of them together you could look to see if evolution has biases toward certain chemical scaffolds - which, it absolutely looks like it does. Super ridiculously cool talk. He did admit that most of the natural product efforts have probably not been published, but they've got 37,000 of them all pulled together. 

You should 100% check out the Natural Product Atlas here. 

Eric Gier, a grad student at in Facundo's lab at Georgia Tech showed his work using cyclic ion mobility to resolve oxylipins from brain injury models. Apparently which of those isomers is building up has a lot to do with how your brain recovers from impacts. Which makes the 100-150ms he showed he needed to really pull them apart into separate peaks not seem like a very reasonable use of time. 

While trying to figure out my hand writing and misspelling of Eric's last name in my notes, I stumbled across this JASMS paper featuring open source software for integrating data from the ion mobility roller coaster. 

One takeaway from the lab was that Waters instruments are a lot physically larger than I expected. The cyclic ion mobility system I saw was easily Astral size, but the new one is a benchtop. A very big benchtop. But they've clearly got their niches for these hardware. Moving native proteins and isomeric drugs around, purifying them by doing multipass IMS and then kicking out the ones they want for MS/MS? That's all stuff I saw people do and things I can't think of anything else that could do.