Keeping Up with the Power List: Part 2

Ron Heeren

Single cell focused spatial biology has now matured to bridge all different “omics,” which is exciting many researchers across the globe. This is revolutionizing our understanding of life’s complexity, which will impact many generations to come.

Susan Richardson 

One exciting development is the development of Vacuum-assisted sorbent extraction (VASE) that can be used with GC-MS to more effectively extract volatile and semivolatile compounds from complex matrices.  It works like SPME, but instead of extracting 1-2% of the analyte, it can extract up to 100% of the analyte (more exhaustive), and leaving the complex matrix (like urine or algae) behind so it doesn’t dirty up the GC inlet.

Koen Sandra

The emergence of various novel study objects ranging from sustainable food products, such as recombinant ingredients, plant-based dairy alternatives and lab-grown meat, to the newest and more complex medicinal products based on proteins, nucleic acids, cells, or even a mix thereof. Some of these therapeutic products seem to act like miniature robots in our bodies, trained and equipped to find and hit their target. These novelties require us, analytical scientists, to drastically sharpen and re-invent the analytical toolbox; a continuous challenge that we will take up with enthusiasm and dedication. Let us furthermore not forget the trending single cell and multi-omics disciplines, personalized medicine and the future adoption of artificial intelligence in our field.

Davy Guillarme 

The most exciting development in analytical science today is the integration of advanced technologies like ultra-high performance liquid chromatography, high-resolution mass spectrometry, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to enhance the performance and predictive capabilities of analytical methods.

Lingjun Li

There have been many exciting developments in analytical science these days; for me, single-cell multi-omics analysis and artificial intelligence/machine learning-assisted multiomics analyses and biomarker discovery, are among the most exciting development and emerging trend in measurement science. These new developments and emerging technologies open up a swatch of new applications ranging from creating tissue- and cell-specific atlas, discovery of novel cell types, to better understanding tumor heterogeneity and chemotherapy resistance in cancer, and gaining novel insights into complex diseases and discovery of new pathways and networks.  Indeed, the capability to map cellular spatial information with multiomics modalities could have tremendous impact on both fundamental and translational research.

Michal Holčapek

In the field of mass spectrometry and its coupling with chromatography, the speed of innovation is very fast because there is a great competition due to the number of leading manufacturers which come with technical innovations annually. A lot of interest has been paid to ion mobility technology, where the resolution provided by leading vendors increased quite significantly, but I still see some limitations in terms of the combination of sensitivity, ion mobility resolution, and the possibility to analyze a broad range of analytes. The cutting-edge configurations of high-resolution tandem mass analyzers offer the ultimate analytical power, which would have been a dream one decade ago. In liquid chromatography, I really appreciate the trend of bioinert systems with surfaces, which significantly reduce the unwanted interactions of ionic biomolecules (e.g., triphosphates) with metal surfaces. This allows for a remarkable improvement of peak shapes for such analytes and the reliable quantitation of ionic biomolecules, which could not be realized before.

Gary Siuzdak 

The most exciting development is the advent of subcellular quantitative imaging of metabolites at the organelle level. A technology being spearheaded by Michael Kurczy (AstraZeneca and University of Gothenberg).

Gunda Köllensperger

These are exciting times for multidisciplinary analytical science. There are many prime examples of emerging technologies which go beyond instrumental and procedural development of a single measurement principle. I am really excited about research on multimodal analysis of single entities such as cells and particles at high throughput. Working in the field of mass spectrometry, I follow with great interest emerging combinations of different types of spectroscopies and mass spectrometry. Multi-modality shows great potential in solution-based assays and in imaging, offering unprecedented opportunities for multiplexing on short transients. Understanding the technicalities of the different methods and setting them in an informative workflow is key for a tailored temporal/spatial analysis. In its simplest form, multimodality applied to imaging supports identification of regions of interest, for subsequent close-ups in a high-resolution modality. Today, multimodal approaches emerge setting-out to systematically bridge gaps in resolution. This way, exciting methods become reachable, allowing imaging across scales, uniting single cell-, tissue- and/or whole organ-level information. I am sure that there will be more exciting developments to come, along with end-to-end workflows integrating dedicated data analysis strategies for indexing, co-registration, data integration and fusion. Which combinations will be pushed will rely on identifying important and accessible biological questions to tackle.

Jeanne E. Pemberton

The increasing use of cheminformatics, an umbrella term that I define to include chemometrics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence methods.  

Konstantin Shoykhet 

Narrowing the topic to the field of liquid chromatography I would highlight two directions: One exciting development is two-dimensional (generally speaking, multi-dimensional) chromatography, including both hardware and software tools.

2D-LC has great potential in cutting-edge research, especially for the analyses of complex mixtures such as biological samples. Its strength is the enormous peak capacity, and the great flexibility it offers to resolve selected analytes of interest. It is like attaching a powerful and intelligent zoom lens to your digital camera, you take a wide-angle shot of a landscape, and you can immediately zoom into the areas of the picture where you see the hint of something interesting.

Also with moderately complex samples, 2D-LC can save method development efforts and shorten the way to the analytical result. Instead of tedious method optimization to resolve critical pairs, one can "delegate" these critical pairs to a second dimension. In this way a more robust method becomes available in a shorter time than is the case with conventional 1D-LC. Additionally, due to their unmatched resolution power, the 2D-LC methods tend to be basically more robust and stable than conventional 1D-LC methods. This makes me believe, multidimensional LC will increasingly enter the market for the routine analyses of biomolecules or macromolecules.  

Another area with lots of interesting innovations is "smartness". Historically, due to limited available computational power, the instrument operation was very deterministic and nearly any process change or adjustment needed a human interference. Nowadays, the computational power even in budget chips, along with modern periphery components (electromechanical parts, sensors, MEMS-devices etc.), facilitate comprehensive instrument monitoring and flexible algorithms of intelligent and conditional instrument control. We are seeing the evolution of “smarter” LC instrumentation, and this development will continue, assisting the instrument operators and service engineers.