Mass Spectrometry & Spectroscopy


Visiting the 38th BMSS Annual Meeting 5th-7th September 2017 BMSS Introduction to Mass Spectrometry Course 4th & 5th September 2017, Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, UK


Trevor Hopkins, Editor, Chromatography Today, trevor@intlabmate.com


The 38th British Mass Spectrometry Society (BMSS) Annual Meeting and Introduction to Mass Spectrometry Short Course was held at the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, UK from 4th to 7th September 2017. The meeting, exhibition and short course were organised by the BMSS.


History of BMSS


The formation of a specialist society formally began in 1964 after various iterations in the 1950’s and 1960’s under the names of the Hydrocarbon Research Group MS Panel and the Mass Spectroscopy Group; the latter was established to refl ect the need of the growing mass spectrometry community for a society to cover all aspects of mass spectrometry.


The fi rst formal conference of the BMSS took place in 1965 at University College, London and BMSS meetings have been held regularly every two years out of three since, in concert with the International Mass Spectrometry Conference (IMSC) which runs on the third year. BMSS has hosted the IMSC three times, in 1973 (Edinburgh), 1985 (Swansea) and 2003 (Edinburgh). A formal constitution for the BMSS was adopted in 1968. In the 1970s the Mass Spectrometry Discussion Group was established to further instrumental developments and fully incorporated with the Mass Spectroscopy Group as the ‘British Mass Spectrometry Society’. In 1980 BMSS was registered with the UK Charity Commission, which required it to have a more educational emphasis.


The Venue


This year the BMSS Annual Meeting was hosted at The Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM) which is one of the leading conservatoires in the world, located in Manchester, England. It is one of four conservatoires associated with the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music. In addition to being a centre of music education, RNCM is one of the UK’s busiest and most diverse public performance venues.


The RNCM has a rich history, dating back to the late 19th century and the establishment of the Royal Manchester College of Music (RMCM). In 1858, Sir Charles Hallé founded the Hallé orchestra in Manchester, and by the early 1890s had raised the idea of a music college in the city. Following an appeal for support, a building on Ducie Street was secured. Hallé was appointed Principal and Queen Victoria conferred the Royal title. The RMCM opened its doors to 80 students in 1893, rising to 117 by the end of the fi rst year. Less than four decades later, in 1920, the Northern School of Music (NSM) was established (initially as a branch of the Matthay School of Music), and for many years the two institutions peacefully coexisted. It wasn’t until 1955 that NSM Principal, Hilda Collens, in recognising the importance of performance in training students, met with RMCM Principal, Frederic Cox, to raise the question of merging. Discussions continued until September 1967 when a Joint Committee was formed to oversee plans to combine the two colleges. The RNCM was formed by amalgamating the NSM and RMCM in 1972, moving to its purpose-built home on Oxford Road in 1973.


The venue, whilst an ideal geographic location showed by an increased attendance was not conducive for an exhibition, with the utilised space, with around 30 suppliers and sponsors in the exhibition on three levels connected by stairs and with seven exhibitors located in a small room – not easily visible to attendees despite the organisers attempts to alert attendees to this area. Some exhibitors disappointed with the traffi c left early. The parallel symposia sessions were held in the Lecture Theatre and the Opera Theatre with the welcome reception, lunches and coffee breaks being held over the three levels.


The posters were positioned in two locations in the Concert Hall and the Brodsky Room, the latter was overcrowded and not in any logical numerical sequence making it diffi cult to conduct a review easily. This could have been caused by the doubling of communications (around 52 oral presentations and 174 posters) in the programme this year compared to 2016.


Figure 1. The 38th BMSS Annual Meeting Venue – Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, UK.


As usual, academia, industry and government were all well represented among the speakers and around 350 delegates were in attendance, “the largest attendance for over a decade” according to Gavin O’Connor the current chairperson. The events were again accompanied by a one-and-a-half-day short course on 4th and 5th September which was designed, in keeping with the societies mantra to have a more educational emphasis, for novices to mass spectrometry who wanted to gain a solid understanding of the instrumentation, and who wanted to gain an awareness of the vast fi eld of applications. For current mass spectrometry users, this provided an excellent refresher to the theory and a means to keep abreast of recent developments and advances in a rapidly changing fi eld.


Course Content


The course covered the fundamental aspects of mass spectrometry, assuming an undergraduate level of basic chemistry, but required no previous practical experience or knowledge of the technique.


Attendees were introduced to the basic concepts and terminology of mass spectrometry and learned about the most important ionisation techniques in mass spectrometry such as electron ionisation, a range of atmospheric pressure ionisation techniques, some of the more recent ambient ionisation/direct analysis techniques and matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionisation. They also discovered how mass analysers work, including quadrupoles, ion traps, time-of-fl ight and Fourier transform mass spectrometers (Orbitrap and FT ICR), plus how hybrid mass spectrometers enable the design of the widest range of MS experiments to solve analytical problems: from compound characterisation to quantifi cation.


LAB ASIA - NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2017


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