Mass Spec Conference

I got to go to a conference in Boston on Mass Spectrometry (Mass Spec). It was very cool to learn about all of the different uses that people have found for this powerful technique. Essentially mass spectrometry is a method of finding out what something is made of. You take a tiny sample and spray it into a machine that vaporizes it into small components and shoots it down a tube lined with magnets. How far the particle makes it down the tube is determined by two things: the mass, how heavy the particle is, and the charge, how attracted to the magnets the particle is. Most small components have a well defined mass to charge ratio meaning the pattern of where their components land in the tube can be used to identify exactly what the component was.  This approach can be used for many different types of samples from a very pure sample of a single protein or chemical to look at variation in structure and stability to looking at a large complex mixture of proteins or chemicals and identifying what individual components are and how much of them is present. If you identify the whole complement of proteins from a given sample it is called the proteome, just like the genome is the whole complement of genes from a given organism. The basic technology has been around since 1886 but advances in the last decade have made it possible to routinely identify 1,000's of proteins from a complex mixture and at much lower concentrations than ever before (papers published in the early 2000's identified 100's of proteins). This makes characterizing proteomes and global changes an actual possibility.

I presented my poster on using mass spec to identify differences in the proteomes of nuclei from young muscle and old muscle and got some good feedback on my approach and conclusions. Essentially I am looking for underlying differences that could explain the loss in muscle mass that leads to frailty with aging. Other people presented on using mass spec to find new therapeutic targets for Parkinson's, to search for new biomarkers of cancer and other diseases to help with early detection, to diagnose infections much faster than traditional approaches, to determine which disease models most closely match the diseases they are meant to represent, to identify new creatures, and to learn about the connection between changes in the genome and RNA production and protein production. One thing that I found very impressive at the meeting was the diversity of skill sets represented. There were people who were mostly engineers working on making better equipment, computer programmers making new software to collect and process the massive data sets, statisticians working on better ways to interpret data, an biologists looking at the best ways to apply the approaches to answering biological questions. It was a good view of the breadth of expertise necessary to make significant scientific advances.