63rd ASMS Conference on Mass Spectrometry and Allied Topics held in St. Louis from 31st May to 4th June, 2015 at the America’s Center, St. Louis, Missouri USA.

The conference started early for many attendees; with one-and two-day short courses beginning on Saturday and Sunday 30th and 31st May from 9:00 am to 4:30 pm, and later on Sunday afternoon with two informative tutorial lectures from 5:00 to 6:30 pm.  

The brief opening ceremony by Vicki Wysocki, ASMS Vice President for Programs, was followed by a lecture entitled The Human Gut Microbiome and Healthy Growth presented by Jeffrey L. Gordon from The Washington University St. Louis School of Medicine who proceeded to describe the work he and his group have undertaken which has focused on childhood under nutrition, which is the single greatest factor in childhood mortality for the under 5 age group in developing countries. The project followed and evaluated 8440 children from different geographical, ethnic and cultural backgrounds and measured weight and height for age and tested faecal samples for pattern in the gut microbiome. 
 

The Opening Reception, located in the poster and exhibition hall, was an opportunity to eat, drink and meet up with colleagues and friends followed this. Heavy hors d’oeuvres (yes, enough for dinner!), free beers from Schlafly brewery in St. Louis, a 21-year-old company which was the first new brewpub to open in Missouri since Prohibition. They provided 2 beers to choose from, and a cash bar for wine lovers was also available. Technical posters did not go up until Monday morning, making this the ideal time to connect with friends, colleagues and exhibitors at their booths.

Monday saw the week start in earnest with a program consisting of 128 parallel oral sessions in the scientific programme and 39 workshops over the four days (32 sessions daily running concurrently with 13 workshops late in the day) and culminating in the plenary lecture - ‘The Evolution of Modern Neurosurgery: A History of Trial and Error, Success and Failure’ - given by G. Michael Lemole, Jr. from The University of Arizona College of Medicine. 
 

There were also 2764 posters displayed during the week covering topics from new developments in ionisation and sampling, metabolomics, glycan and glycoprotein analysis and quantitative analysis of biomarkers to top-down protein analysis and daily workshops ensuring again 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 exhausted by 17:00 then there were the 13 Workshops running daily from 17:45 to 19:00 leaving one hour for dinner before the Corporate Hospitality suites swung into action at 20:00; providing endless snacks, refreshments and entertainment all lasting until 23:00.
 

Attendance was down compared to previous years by 8% compared to the ASMS 2014 conference at 6,100 (see Table 1 for recent history) with attendees from many of the states in the USA, and 25% of attendees being from overseas with Canada, UK and Germany there en mass. There was an increase in the number of exhibitors, up to 200 from 171 exhibit booths in 2014. 

Table 1. Attendance figures for ASMS by year.

ASMS Awards

2015 Award for a Distinguished Contribution in Mass Spectrometry
The 2015 ASMS Award for a Distinguished Contribution in Mass Spectrometry was awarded to Dr Brian T. Chait, the Head of the Laboratory of Mass Spectrometry and Gaseous Ion Chemistry and a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Professor at The Rockefeller University, New York, NY. 
Dr Chait was recognised for his work on the recognition and demonstration of the link between protein structure and conformation and electrospray ionisation mass spectra. His revelation that a protein’s solution phase conformation impacts its electrospray ionisation mass spectrometry (ESI-MS) charge state distribution (CSD) removed prior barriers preventing mass spectrometry from looking at higher order macromolecular structures. 

Today as a result of his work, interpreting ESI-MS and MS/MS data for proteins in native solutions many times begins from NMR or crystal structures, based on assumptions that the gas-phase structure will not be too distant. The Chait laboratory opened the world to this possibility, first by demonstrating that electrosprayed cytochrome c molecules assumed about twice as much charge when sprayed from pH 2.6 than from pH 5.2 H2O (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 112, 9012 (1990)), by probing conformational changes in proteins via hydrogen/deuterium exchange (Rapid Commun. Mass Spectrom. 5, 214 (1991)), and by monitoring solution-phase thermal denaturation processes by ESI-MS (Anal. Chem. 65, 1, (1993)). 

Dr Chait’s achievement must be viewed from the perspective of mass spectrometry in 1990 when spraying 100% aqueous solutions was rare or the need was not obvious. For some an organic sheath solvent (or make-up flow) reduced surface tension enough to complete the analyses; others simply added methanol directly. However, Chowdhury and Chait (Anal. Chem. 63, 1660 (1991)) demonstrated that electropolished needles could electrospray water at voltages sufficiently below those inducing dielectric breakdown. That ability to electrospray 100% H2O was key to observing the charge state distribution differences associated with natively folded proteins. Equally important was Dr Chait’s ability to rationalise and prove that the source of the observed CSD difference had to be solution-phase structure. 
Little is known about electrospray ionisation today; and even less was known 25 years ago, yet the ideas that Dr Chait precisely articulated about the electrospray CSD/conformation relationship were a major turning point for biological mass spectrometry. 

Biemann Medal

Dr Michael J. MacCoss a professor in the Department of Genome Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle has made numerous high impact contributions to the field of proteomics. Primarily his software development, which he makes freely available and continually supports, has greatly benefitted the proteomic sciences. 

Other Bioinformatics tools developed by the MacCoss laboratory in Seattle has included tools for liquid chromatography mass spectrometry (LC- MS) feature finding, spectrum library searching, peak detection, post-processors for peptide database searching, and more. The Percolator algorithm developed by his lab, improved peptide identification from proteomic analyses through machine learning (Käll et al. ‘Semi-supervised learning for peptide identification from shotgun proteomics datasets’, Nature Methods, 2007). Open source libraries and licenses for Percolator resulted in widespread adoption Percolator became widely adopted and encouraged its incorporation into multiple commercial packages (e.g. Mascot and Proteome Discoverer). Skyline, another project from the MacCoss laboratory, is an integrated set of software tools (MacLean et al. ‘Skyline: an open source document editor for creating and analysing targeted proteomics experiments’, Bioinformatics, 2010; available from http://skyline.maccosslab.org). Most importantly Skyline is a manufacturer-neutral set of tools enabling methods to be transferred easily, tested and validated across labs, even those utilising different instrument platforms. 
Dr MacCoss’s most recent project ‘The Chorus Project’ (http://chorusproject.org) is a not-for-profit and cost effective mechanism enabling laboratories to visualise, share, analyse and backup data to the cloud. 

New Product Roundup

In the interests of impartiality companies introducing new instruments and products are listed in alphabetical order, we have tried to feature the majority of new products introductions for 2015.
Agilent Technologies announced the launch of the 6545 LC/Q-TOF System, designed to provide added sensitivity for routine analyses.
The new midrange system includes advances in hardware and software that make it both more reliable and easier to use for trace-level analysis of small-molecule compounds in applications such as food safety, environmental testing, forensic toxicology and pharmaceuticals.
The 6545 is engineered to be Agilent’s most reliable Q-TOF ever, building on a legacy for LC/MS reliability and adding hardware advances such as ion shaping optics, high-voltage power supplies, and longer-life parts to increase robustness.
The system’s new autotune software leverages particle swarm technology to optimise the instrument for small-molecule analyses with the click of a button. In just about 15 minutes, it optimises the instrument to get up to five times more sensitivity for small molecule compounds, including low-intensity compounds.

Agilent also introduced a new triple quadrupole mass spectrometer for LC/MS applications requiring the highest sensitivity and robustness. The Agilent 6470 LC/MS Triple Quadrupole system (Figure 2), featuring a lower LDL of <4fg, a smaller footprint and the system is upgradeable to the 6495 and is designed for Food Testing, Environmental Analysis, Drug Development and Clinical Research.
The latest addition to Agilent’s industry-leading ICP-MS portfolio, the 7800 ICP-MS provides a wide dynamic range, exceptional matrix-tolerance, and superior interference removal, together with optimisation tools and documentation to simplify method development and operation.
The new features and automation tools enables fast implementation, easy method setup, and simpler routine operation for many common sample types and applications, with Agilent offering industry-specific application packages to help users fast-track routine analyses. 
Packages available now include those for drinking water, environmental waste and pharmaceutical applications. Packages for food testing and other applications will be available soon. The packages include standard operating procedures, method-specific batch templates and predefined report layouts.

Future ASMS Dates:

Dates and venues for the forthcoming ASMS meetings have been announced as follows:
64th ASMS Conference, 5 – 9 June, 2016, San Antonio, TX
65th ASMS Conference, 4 – 8 June, 2017, Indianapolis, IN
66th ASMS Conference, 3 – 7 June, 2018, San Diego, CA
67th ASMS Conference, 2 – 6 June, 2019, Atlanta, GA

The site of the 63rd ASMS was St. Louis founded in 1764 and named after Louis IX of France. First claimed by the French the region in which the city stands today was ceded to Spain following France’s defeat in the Seven Years’ War. Its territory east of the Mississippi was ceded to the Kingdom of Great Britain, the victor. After the United States acquired this territory in the Louisiana Purchase the town became the territorial capital and gateway to the western territory and the starting point for the Lewis and Clark expedition, which departed from St. Louis in May 1804 in search of water route to the Pacific Ocean. The city is commonly identified with the 630-foot (192 m) tall Gateway Arch in downtown St. Louis (Figure 1).