I haven't been able to travel much the last couple of years due to some family health stuff that is absolutely and totally fine now (whew!) and this can be the last time I ever mention it or even think about it. So. When it was okay to go places and I saw that I could maybe squeeze in a favorite meeting and one I've always heard about in one shot on a weird little island I've always wanted to visit I was so so so pysched. Expectations were very very high.
These meetings exceeded them all.
Important part: If you are developing some single cell technology that you KNOW is cool. That you KNOW from painstaking empirical measurements (and also in your heart, I guess) that it works and you think it has applications if you can get some skeptics off your back (skeptics who are whispering "...why don't you just poorly measure the transcript abundance of 4 BILLION CELLS? People have been spending billions of dollars on transcriptomics for 20 years and it has solved every disease and has led to unprecedented levels of new diagnostics and drugs [clarification. my sarcasm is underappreciated. it has NOT]..." iSCMS is where people question everything. iSCMS is where you see multi-multi-multi-omics and meet people who have coupled 2 things together that you've riddled over. Maybe it's backward. It's probably backward.
There was a lot of unpublished data. And a lot of great people. So I'm going to be very careful here. On the proteomics side it was heavy hitters all the way through. Ryan Kelly showed off the 5 minute proteomics stuff (paper on the blog about 3 weeks ago?) and Erwin Schoof went over his recent Science paper and the smartest use of an antibody you've ever seen. He also inspired me to apply for permission to get the API access on my TIMSTOF again, because he's doing stuff I really want to be able to do.
There was a lot of discussion around...um...my last blog post....not that...actually... the paper it was about.... but it was very positive. Single cell proteomics is growing fast enough to have cool new stuff to talk about almost every week. I think the last time I saw so much conversation around a paper and so many people with the downloaded .raw files sitting around discussing it was 2014. I can't find a post, but that's when we discovered with the Human Proteome Draft maps that our false discovery rate tools were vastly underpowered when given millions of mass spectra. That discussion transformed LCMS proteomics and made it more powerful and made us more confident in our findings and I think we've hit one of those moments that is going to be very good for science.
But it's not all proteomics here. There is single cell lipidomics and metabolomics. Work from the conference chair and host Melanie Bailey has been featured on this blog more than once. Wow. Blast from the past, I guess I was really skeptical about the first paper. I clearly warmed up to it a little while later, and I'm 100% converted. The number of controls they put in to make sure they're measure lipids and metabolites in single cells is AMAZING.
On...that...note....on the proteomics side, Alejandro Brenes (I'm jumping to BMSS) gave a plenary lecture that made me legitimately nauseous. Puke emoji. Take away - do a master mix blank! Don't do a water blank on single cells. And...maybe do all your prep in a hood. Which is going to suck. But...we're totally going to do it. I may very seriously need to start working on an erratum regarding one of my papers. It is possible that one of my findings is just single cell specific contaminants I've never heard of until this week. We'll look at it when I get back to fast wifi.
Breaking up all this text with a picture from the next meeting The British Mass Spec Society! Was there single cell proteomics? Sure! Was there a custom PARTICLE ACCELERATOR for bombardment level mass spec that hits a surface with an impact at 10% of the speed of light? It's only just now operational but what would you do with mass spec imaging if you could hit your tissue hard enough for proteins to ionize off of it AND X-RAYS? Well, Catia Costa was like "I'll do that first and then do immunohistochemistry afterward!" which sounds...absurd at first, but with sub micron spatial resolution... there's material left for those boring old low resolution antibodies. [Sarcasm check, generally antibodies are considered far higher resolution than any technology with mass spec].
London has been slandered, btw, I was expecting flat beer and gross food. And I've had neither of those things. Actually, someone at my hotel thought I was American or drunk or both and gave me scratch off tickets and I won 50% off dinner at some very American restaurant. It was mediocre food, but at a super great price.
Honestly this might be one of my most professionally successful conferences. Do I now know a guy who can sample live cells for metabolomics? Did I talk him into sending me cells for something? I hope so.
Did I convince a company or two to let me send them part of our rapidly growing cohort of carefully curated human liver samples/cells/tissues to help me get un-stuck where I'm currently very very stuck? Again, I hope so.
I finally saw a single cell robot that I really truly think I need and now I need demo data to go try and find money for it. Oh and Bogdan popped in to show off single cell spatial (optical) labeling and then showed off way better SCP data on his 7600 than what I was able to get on mine. (He has the Ion Opticks nanospray source that wasn't available before the flood destroyed mine. It probably isn't just that he's a better mass spectrometrist than me.)
I also got to see posters and flash talks from this generation of scientists who are doing their graduate work in the post-pandemic environment where single cell mass spectrometry is just - a thing their mentor taught them how to do. That looks silly as I type it, but - sure - there is still lots of method development we can do. And probably have to do. But you don't have to spend every minute of every day trying to get single cell or spatial to work. I saw 20 great posters where students are APPLYING this stuff. From basic biological discovery (super cool award winning work on single plant cells!) through glioblastoma drugs and how they effect the sub-cellular single cell metabolome (another award winning poster).
Not every poster or student talk could win an award. But I swear EVERY SINGLE ONE was something that I'd consider science fiction or silicon valley con artist level bullshit just a few years ago. I'm up to my neck in single cell data and not everyone is. There are real skeptics out there that I don't really have to face as much anymore, single cell proteomics is nearly established. This was the place to discuss how to get the evidence necessary to convince those critics that what you're doing in single cells is valid (and important). I hope students were inspired by the numbers of rejection letters I proudly talk about rather than just concerned about ever graduating if it happens to them.
I should probably stop typing and go see another famous bridge or clock or torture chamber or get a beer that requires a lot of physical force to squeeze out of a wooden...barrel...?...it looks funny and it's slow, but it's also novel and delicious. I don't have a lot of hours left in this beautiful city.
Thanks for the organizers for letting me show off my lab's research in liver diseases in women that don't have any effective diagnostics and talk about what collaborations are going well which ones are challenging with our SCP tools and hardware. AND there IS a live proteomics show podcast that was recorded here! I'll get the audio when some of the organizers get a chance to sleep (this was clearly SO MUCH WORK). Thank you to King's College, Dr. Bailey, SEISMIC, iSCMS, and BMSS and everyone I forgot.
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