Johns Hopkins is a school in the world’s greatest city that our field doesn’t think about too much due largely to a historic bias the school has toward genomics. A few years ago my rough math was that the school was spending $400 on RNASeq for every $1 that it spent on proteomics. (I think it was worse, I found a single PI who spent over $20M in Illumina reagents in one calendar year, that year the school purchased one triple quad and a single QE Plus to HF upgrade.) As a further example, name another big university that doesn’t have a metabolomics core facility. I’ll wait.
ARE THE WINDS CHANGING? Bob Cole set up a mass spec day and PEOPLE SHOWED UP!
These things have been tried here and then over the years in town and it’s often been Dave Colquoun(SP?) and myself in the audience and maybe 3 grad students who look uncomfortable, as if they accidentally went to the wrong room and feel bad leaving something so poorly attended.
Over 100 people watched remotely and a decent sized room was filled. Some of the highlights from my perspective were:
Peggi Angel showing more of her group’s amazing heterogeneity data (proteins in context, but this time from the imaging perspective).
Ryan Kelly (stranded in Belgium due to this stupid virus) and Peter Nemes demonstrating more of their push toward understanding systems at the single cell level.
Marian Kalocsay showed the most impressive use of APEX labeling technologies that I’ve ever heard of. I’m not 100% how much I can talk about here because he was clear a lot had not been published. His group is pushing our understanding of how biological systems work — in almost real time — by being very very clever about how, where, and when they apply APEX. Definitely watch out.
Brian Foster described targeting in a “post proteomic map” world and how to leverage tools like Panorama Web, PASSEL, the SRM Atlas, and SRM and SureQuant(TM,R), etc., to get to the protein information that you want.
There were other great speakers and I think someone called out sick because I got a chance to speed ramble through how we’re using single cell proteomics to figure out drug mechanisms that we’ve been stuck on.
AND I learned a total life hack. Someone left the door to the sound booth open the whole day and I just hung out in there. The chair was way more comfortable, it was perfectly in the middle of the screen, where everyone else was to the left or right of a main central set of stairs and I had a full desk for my laptop and notes.
