Glycan Analysis Opens Up New Possibilities For Mass Spectrometry

Once again the mighty ASMS Conference flexes its muscles and heads into town, on this occasion Salt Lake City, to allow practitioners of the technique to meet, network, hear presentations from the great and the good,
view poster sessions and see the latest offerings from the manufacturers and suppliers. The scale and credibility of this scientific meeting is certainly having an effect on the attendance on more generalist scientific
meetings in North America such as the Pittsburgh Conference on Applied Spectroscopy and the HPLC series of shows held in the US every two years. Its organisation is something that other meeting organisers could take some points from, especially the rates charged to attendees. Having noted that point it is also in danger of becoming a victim of its own success and scale if it continues to expand at the current rate. Clear, selective planning was required by attendees prior to even heading out to the venue as to which oral and poster sessions they should be attending. The event this year had in excess of 6,000 attendees, over 160 exhibitors and over 2,700 posters. In addition to that also on offer were over 50 oral sessions, countless workshops, short courses and Tutorial sessions and a spare mental hard drive was a necessity.

AWARDS
Recognition of one’s contribution for the advancement of science in general should be the aim of all scientists. In this case the topic is Mass Spectroscopy. An award from the ASMS committee for Distinguished Contribution in Mass Spectroscopy was made to Dr Martin L. Vestal for his work in the development of the first commercial MALD-TOF Instrument - the Voyager series. Such is the importance of Dr Vestals work and its relevance today is the fact that over half of the commercially available Instruments utilise elements of his design.

The Biemann Medal was presented to Dr David C. Muddiman from North Carolina State University for his work on ‘hydrophobic tagging’, which not only resulted in a sensitivity gain of one order of magnitude on ESI
(electrospray ionisation) by the addition to samples of a hydrophobic alkyl chain molecule, but also was utilised to improve the response of peptides in ESI systems.

Finally the Ron Hites award for outstanding Research Publication in JAMAS (Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry) went to Professor Facuundo Fernandez from the Georgia Institute of Technology for his article on ‘Direct Quantitaion of Active Ingredients in Solid Artesunate Antimalarials by Noncovalent Complex Forming Reactive Desorption Electrospray Ionisation Mass Spectroscopy’ [1]