Mass Spectrometry & Spectroscopy
67th ASMS Conference on Mass Spectrometry and Allied Topics held in Atlanta from June 2nd to 6th, 2018 at the Georgia World Congress Center, Atlanta, Georgia USA. Trevor Hopkins, International Labmate Contributing Editor for Chromatography and Spectroscopy.
A hot (30ºC+) and humid Atlanta, Georgia was the venue for the 67th ASMS Conference.
Young scientists were again featured prominently in the ASMS programme with an Undergraduate Students and First Time (at ASMS) Graduate Students meeting on Sunday from 4:00 - 4:45 pm which covered ‘Plan Your Strategy: What to See and Do at ASMS’; and a Special Program for Undergraduate Students with a Sunday, 7:30 - 9:00 pm, Poster competition in the, Exhibit Hall and a Monday, 11:30 am - 1:00 pm, ‘Meet the Experts’ session with free lunch, where lunch tables were reserved for undergraduate students in the Exhibit Hall.
The conference started early for many enthusiastic attendees; with one-and two-day short courses beginning on Saturday and Sunday 1st and 2nd of June from 9:00 am to 4:30 pm; on Sunday, the four tutorial lectures, which was started in 2017, were held in two parallel session’s starting at 5 pm. In one parallel pathway, Stephen Blanksby from the Queensland U. of Technology & Gavin Reid from the University of Melbourne presented ‘Lipidomics’ and Enrico Davoli from the Mario Negri Institute presented ‘Targeting Imaging’. In the other pathway, Michal Sharon from the Weizmann Institute discussed, ‘Native Mass Spectrometry’ and Birgit Schilling of the Buck Institute presented ‘Data Independent Acquisition’.
The brief opening ceremony was followed by a very informative, data rich and interesting lecture, which contained zero reference to mass spectrometry yet hosted some 4,000 ASMS participants with standing room only - twenty deep at the rear, entitled ‘Transitioning the World Energy for All Purposes to Stable Electricity Powered by 100% Wind, Water, and Sunlight’ by Mark Z. Jacobson, Stanford University.
Mark graduated with both a B.S. in Civil Engineering, BA in Economics, and an MS in Environmental Engineering from Stanford University (1988) followed by an MS (1991) and PhD (1994) in Atmospheric Science from the University of California at Los Angeles. His work has focused on better understanding air pollution and global warming problems and developing large-scale clean, renewable energy solutions to them. Toward that end, he has developed and applied three-dimensional atmosphere-biosphere-ocean computer models and solvers to simulate air pollution, weather, climate, and renewable energy. He has also developed roadmaps to transition countries, states, cities, and towns to 100% clean, renewable energy for all purposes and computer models to examine grid stability in the presence of high penetrations of renewable energy. In 2019 Mark was voted as one of the worlds top 100 people in climate change.
Mark’s lecture discussed the energy plans he has developed over the last ten years to completely switch over to clean renewable energy. He proposed that there are three driving forces to this; Air Pollution, Global Warming and Energy Security. His proposal was to electrify, cool and heat employing wind, water and solar sources, The data provided in the forty fi ve minute talk was compelling and left the audience feeling why hasn’t this been done already. His home is totally powered by solar and has no natural gas supply so he heats, cooks’, powers his two cars etc. and claims his payback for the upfront capital outlay is 5-10 years.
This was followed by the Opening Reception, located in the poster-exhibit hall, an opportunity to meet up with exhibitors, colleagues and old friends whilst eating and drinking. Hors d’oeuvres stations scattered through the exhibit/poster hall (enough for dinner!), free ‘SweetWater 420 - a tasty West Coast style Extra Pale Ale accentuated with a stimulating hop character’ brewed locally in Atlanta by the SweetWater Brewing Company and a cash bar for wine were all available. Technical posters were not posted until Monday morning.
Monday saw ASMS start for the early risers with a choice of 17 breakfast seminars, hosted by the corporate members, starting at 7:00 am and the oral presentations, exhibition and posters starting in earnest at 08:30 with a total of 384 oral presentations running in 8 parallel sessions of the scientifi c programme over the four days (32 sessions daily running concurrently) and culminating on Thursday with the closing plenary lecture entitled ‘Chemistry of Food and Soft Drinks’ by Lilly D’Angelo of Global Food & Beverage Technology Associates.
This year there was a whopping 3133 posters (compared to 3279 in 2018, 2889 in 2017 and 2982 in 2016) displayed during the week with an allowed one-hour non-overlapping lunch break. All presenters were now scheduled for 3 hours with odd-number posters presented between 10:30 - 11:30 am PLUS 12:30 - 2:30 pm and even-number posters presented 10:30 am - 12:30 pm PLUS 1:30 - 2:30 pm. A new feature this year promoted by ASMS was the use of QR Code Signs for Poster Presentations, permitting people interested in specifi c
posters to register their interest from the ASMS mobile app. The poster topics covered ranged from instrumentation and imaging to native MS in structural biology cannabis testing and protein topics aplenty, ensuring that if you did not utilise a prior selection process of some sort you would miss out on many interesting topics and have very sore feet. If you weren’t walked and talked out by 17:00 then there were 18 Workshops (up from 15 in 2018) running daily Monday to Wednesday from 17:45 to 19:00 leaving just one hour for dinner before the Corporate Hospitality suites swung into action at 20:00; providing endless fi nger foods, snacks, refreshments and conversation - all lasting until 23:00.
Attendance was down slightly (~6%), compared to the ASMS 2018 conference, at 6,675 attendees (see Table 1 for recent history) with attendees from 52 countries plus all 50 US States and Puerto Rico. There were 180 (191 in 2018) exhibit booths.
Year 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019
Location Vancouver Minneapolis Baltimore St. Louis
San Antonio Indianapolis San Diego Atlanta
Table 1. Historical Attendances ASMS Awards
2019 John B. Fenn Award for a Distinguished Contribution in Mass Spectrometry
The ASMS Award for a Distinguished Contribution in Mass Spectrometry was renamed to honour the memory of John B. Fenn, who shared the 2002 Nobel Prize for the development of electrospray Ionisation, and was an active member of ASMS from 1986 until his passing in 2010.
The 2019 John B. Fenn ASMS Award for a Distinguished Contribution in Mass Spectrometry was awarded to Dr John R. Yates for his development of automated, large- scale interpretation of peptide tandem mass spectral data.
Dr Yates, a Professor in the Department of Molecular Medicine, The Scripps Research Institute developed the SEQUEST algorithm and laid a critical foundation for the fi eld of proteomics that has enhanced the accuracy and effectiveness of mass spectrometry permitting the understand important biological and clinical questions.
Total Attendees 6,277 6,140 6,913 6,100 6,276 6,338 7,147 6,675
INTERNATIONAL LABMATE - JULY 2019
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