IMSC2022 Sneak Preview
Jan Commandeur, Technical Director at MS Vision, gives a sneak preview of the International Mass Spectrometry Conference 2022, where he is a member of the local organizing committee, and which takes place August 27–September 2 in Maastricht
Jan Commandeur | | 3 min read | News
The IMSC is the central event in the International Mass Spectrometry Foundation’s calendar, drawing together colleagues from universities, industry, and research institutions for workshops, policy discussions, and business meetings across the breadth of mass spectrometry. IMSC2022 is an in-person event with many activities to strengthen the community and to further advance everyone’s professional network in mass spectrometry.
The program consists of plenary lectures by leading scientists, parallel sessions, short courses, and poster sessions. In the evening, several workshops are organized on instrumentation, native MS, forensics and imaging MS. I’d specifically like to highlight the workshop on Monday run by Females in Mass Spectrometry (femalesinms.com) – a community-led initiative focused on creating a network of support for women in the field of mass spectrometry. During this workshop, speakers will share how they have advocated for themselves throughout their career, the importance of identifying a mentor who promotes them (in addition to their supervisor), and advice on mentorship for supervisors.
At the start of the conference, 10 short courses on a variety of topics, including ion mobility, tandem MS and clinical proteomics, will be led by leading scientists in their respective fields.
In particular, I’m looking forward to the short course on lipidomics, which will be led by Stephen Blanksby and Michal Holcapek, and will provide a basic introduction to lipidomic analysis by mass spectrometry (MS) using both MS-only approaches and MS-hyphenation with separation techniques, including ultrahigh-performance liquid chromatography and ultrahigh-performance supercritical fluid chromatography. The main focus of the short course is the acquisition and analysis of MS-based lipidomics data, including i) lipid identification and annotation, and ii) quantitation. Examples, including the application of lipidomic quantitation in early cancer detection, will be shown, highlighting the importance of carefully selected internal standards, analytical validation, the use of quality control samples, and how chemical derivatization improves the lipidomic coverage of low-abundant lipid classes with unfavorable physicochemical properties.
For more information on all evening workshops, short courses, and registration please go to https://www.imsc2022.com/programme/short-courses/.
I hope to see you there!
Manfred’s MS Wishlist
A few words with IMSC 2022 Chair Manfred Wuhrer, who is also Professor of Proteomics and Glycomics at Leiden University, The Netherlands
What are you most looking forward to at IMSC 2022?
This will be my first international MS meeting for the past few years, so I very much look forward to meeting colleagues and establishing new contacts. The meeting will be even more important for my students and young team members – for many of them this will be their first large international science conference, and the contacts, impressions and knowledge they will gain may shape the future course of their career.
Are there any specific developments over the last year or so that have caught your attention?
I am excited about ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) and its vast potential. Although it has been around for a while, it is now really taking off, with IMS being implemented in many MS configurations. The combination of MS and IMS provides amazing insights into the characteristics of gas phase ions and allows researchers to address many long-pending questions.
What’s on your ultimate MS “wish list?”
The improvements in terms of MS speed, sensitivity and resolution have been amazing in the last few decades, and I hope we can benefit from further improvements along the same lines. Furthermore, my wish list includes more robust and facile mass spectrometry infrastructure, supporting the implementation of MS in many application areas. Finally, I would love to see more advanced data processing and analysis workflows that try and make use of the valuable information in MS datasets, which we are currently not mining.
Jan Commandeur is Technical Director at MS Vision
