The Column - June 2008 - (Page 16) Incognito The Column www.thecolumn.eu.com June 2008 delegates involved in Karaoke, guitar hero video game playing, roulette tables and dancing in a simulated discothèque. One particularly notable delegate (“Freebie man”) was dressed in a vendor t-shirt, wearing a full Viking helmet, vendor head and wrist sweatbands, a flashing heart-shaped necklace and carrying armloads of vendor-endorsed ice cream. Ladies and gentlemen of the MS community — some decorum please! On a more positive note, the poster sessions (there were more than 2000 on display over the course of the meeting), were generally of a very high standard and perhaps most encouragingly were well attended by the authors, which gave the opportunity to discuss the work carried out. It seems to me that posters sessions such as these are an excellent way of quickly disseminating information, and while it is tough on the legs to get round them all, I don’t see the same volume or quality on display here at UK meetings. If any readers know of a UK conference or meeting that provides high quality poster sessions please let me know as I’d like to attend. Finally to the content of the meeting. It would appear from a brief straw poll of colleagues that the quality of the speakers and the content of the oral presentations was a little down on previous years, but my poll was by no means comprehensive. It would also appear that, certainly within the MS arena, biochemical analysis is very rapidly expanding and for a small molecules person such as myself it was an education in post-translational modifications and a host of unpronounceable bio-markers. However, this is the way forward for those working in genetic therapeutic areas and as such a necessity. There also seemed to a great deal of new hardware and software able to produce and subsequently deconvolute high resolution spectra — with time-of-flight and Fourier transform MS systems becoming much more routine (despite the very high cost of the latter instrument type) and again these seemed to be aligned strongly towards proteomics and something called “Petroleomics”. Why is everything now an “-omics”? There are so many “-omics” now that we will soon have to find an alternative suffix — any particularly amusing ones will be published in subsequent issues!! In terms of interface evolution there are interesting developments in the field of ion mobility spectrometry that I am told will render the need for chromatographic separations obsolete. I would like to produce a future review on this technology and would welcome comments and papers from readers who can enlighten me further — I remain to be convinced at this point. In summary then my luggage was lost after a nine hour flight and was not returned until two days before I left, my legs still ache after the mammoth walk around the posters and I was appalled by the behaviour of some usually very restrained colleagues. However, I’m very pleased to have visited ASMS this year and would welcome comments on any of the points outlined above. I look forward to attending UK meetings with much improved poster sessions and to speaking with you all at a meeting or conference very soon — especially those of you who have graduated but not yet reached the dizzy heights of laboratory or departmental management. 16 Ryan McVay/Getty Images http://www.thecolumn.eu.com
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.