Some recent conference news from our US office

Some news and photos of the recent conferences we have attended in the US.

Experimental Biology: San Diego Conference Centre (April 22-24^th)

We arrived in San Diego to set up our booth on Saturday and the exhibition didn’t start until Sunday so this gave us a chance to explore San Diego and take in a San Diego Padres baseball game. Having them win was a bonus and set us up nicely for a very busy few days at the conference itself.

Experimental Biology is a large and varied meeting with the 5 Society themes dominating the content: Anatomy, Biochemistry, Nutrition, Physiology and Pathology. There were 10,000 scientific attendees and another 3,500 exhibitors, with over 1,500 posters on display showing a diverse set of analytical techniques applicable to each of the five main themes.

The main interest from visitors to our booth was in Progenesis SameSpots and Progenesis LC-MS, our solutions for proteomics data analysis. One of the things in particular that people liked were the ion intensity maps, which allow you to view your runs as you import them into the Progenesis LC-MS software. Visualizing the data generated by LC-MS is big challenge for researchers and it is something Progenesis software is becoming recognized for. Another trend that was reported to us during the event was the rising interest in 2DE across the Far East, which is reflected by the increasing number of publications from these countries that apply 2D gel analysis.

So a fun but exhausting few days with so much going on, but then we moved on to……

103^rd AOCs Annual Meeting and Expo : Long Beach (April 29th – May 2nd)

The convention center was located very close to the Harbor not far from the Queen Mary Cruise liner which is now a hotel and visitor attraction.  The weather on the Sunday was beautiful so we took advantage of the scenery and walked around the harbor after set up was complete.

This was the first time we have attended this conference and we arrived to find a complementary plant welcoming us to the conference as a first time attendee. This was a nice touch!

Research into edible oils and refined oils appear the main focus of the conference. Also, a lot of work is being done on the stability of foodstuffs with reference to measurement of oil related compounds, how the products are transport and stored. This also brings into question the process of foodstuff storage and breakdown. So, much of the research presented related to analysis of lipids, both targeted and untargeted, using LC-MS as well as GC-MS techniques.

This meant there was a lot of interest in Progenesis CoMet and researchers in the field of lipidomics seem to understand what is needed to overcome many of the challenges that proteomics has faced. People we met at our booth already understood the need for well designed experiments and robust statistical analysis. Some of the features that drew attention were the PCA plots and the correlation analysis dendrogram within the software. The general opinions given from these group of researchers was that if you can’t generate good statistical validation of the question you are asking then don’t even bother asking the question.

Since this was our first time attending the conference it was a bit of an unknown as to how our products would be received but we were pleasantly surprised to find quite a range of potential applications and we had multiple comments complementing us on the design of the software saying how easy the user interface looked for analysing complex data. This is where Progenesis CoMet can help with large-scale analysis of lipids and other compounds.

We now have a short time to draw breath before ASMS which starts this weekend in Vancouver. Hope to see you there, keep an eye on Twitter and the blog for our latest news.

Label-free LC-MS and 2D gel electrophoresis, complementary approaches to increase proteome coverage

Back in January 2010 I introduced EPSRC CASE award PhD student Andrew Porter, who we sponsor in Prof Gary Black’s lab at Northumbria University. Since then we have been working with them and shared some early results on developing label-free LC-MS methods using a low-resolution ion-trap to study the C. japonicus proteome.

The project has now expanded to include 2D gel electrophoresis (2DE) analysis of C. japonicas, the first time this proteome has been successfully separated by 2DE. In his latest poster Andrew has compared expression changes detected by 2DE and LC-MS in response to growth on xylan, a complex carbohydrate.

           

Left: The proteome of C. japonicus grown on xylan substrate successfully resolved by 2DE. Right: Label-free LC-MS used with gas-phase fractionation to increase proteome coverage by 25%. Progenesis LC-MS automatically calculates the m/z ranges needed to generate the same number of features per fraction.

C. japonicus is a soil bacterium capable of breaking down plant material (lignocellulose) into raw materials for bioethanol production.  Understanding the proteins involved in utilising complex carbon sources can lead to bioengineering designed to improve biofuel processing.

Andrews approach included the use of Progenesis LC-MS with Gas Phase Fractionation (GPF) to quantify and then identify 25% more of the proteome compared to LC-MS without GPF. This is due to the selection of more precursors for MS2. The significant differentially expressed proteins  present(based on p-value <0.05 and fold-change >2) when the organism was grown on xylan compared to glucose were identified.

The 2DE approach used IC5 (Dojindo Laboratories) stained 2DE gels for detecting differential expression, an alternative to Cye Dyes (GE Healthcare). Analysing the spot patterns from two sets of 6 replicate samples produced a list of 49 significant, differentially expressed proteins when C. japonicus was grown on xylan compared to glucose.

In a final step, the top 24 most abundant proteins detected in samples grown on xylan compared to glucose were compared between 2DE and LC-MS. The most abundant proteins detected by LC-MS were based on MASCOT scores and the most abundant proteins detected by 2DE were based on normalised spot intensity.  Only 7 proteins were found in common between them. So, combining analysis results from both techniques will be used to reinforce and validate findings in lower abundance proteins, which are more commonly associated with carbohydrate degradation.

Only seven proteins were found to be common in the top 24 most abundant, when C. japnicus was grown on xylan, detected by both 2DE and label-free LC-MS with gas-phase fractionation. This shows the benefit of applying complementary approaches to increase your overall proteome coverage.

This shows the advantage of applying two complementary techniques to increase the detected expression changes you can discover within your proteome of interest. Progenesis software supports this with a common approach to  analyse different data types. It allows you to quickly become confident in using either approach and generate results for publication. The latest features in Progenesis SameSpots also allow you to import lists of protein identifications, generated by LC-MS/MS, and assign them to your detected spots. This builds up a 2D gel map of your proteins of interest for future reference.

You can download Progenesis SameSpots and download Progenesis LC-MS to try the common workflow and individual features with your own data. If you need any help to get started or would like a demonstration, get in touch, and we can arrange this with you.

Our busy conference season kicks off this weekend

Back in January we looked ahead to some conferences taking place in early 2012. Spring is now upon us and we are entering an extremely busy period for Nonlinear in terms of events. At the last count we have 12 conferences lined up over the next 3 months, all in different parts of the world.

The meetings we attend range from small society meetings, with a few hundred attendees, to large international conferences attracting many thousands of delegates. We get a lot out of both types of event, we can meet existing customers, keep abreast of the latest advances in proteomics and metabolomics, learn about new applications and of course show  Progenesis to potential new customers.

The full Progenesis range can be seen at our booth. We can show you the workflow on some demo data, or you can pre-arrange to bring some of your own data if you would prefer. If you’re interested in metabolomics, the Progenesis CoMet v2.0 Beta (not yet available to download from the website) will be on show – so its a great opportunity to see the latest developments.

See our full list of events on our website.

Some of the highlights in April and May are:

Experimental Biology (EB2012)

Starting this weekend in San Diego, EB2012 is a multidisciplinary meeting which attracts nearly 14,000 scientists, represents six sponsoring societies and 30 guest societies. It is an excellent opportunity to meet with scientists from a wide range of research areas who do proteomics or metabolomics as part of their work. You get to talk to literally hundreds of scientists, so we’re looking forward to it!

AOCS (American Oil Chemists’ Society) Annual Meeting & Expo

Following hot on the heels of EB2012, we have the AOCS meeting (April 29th) which is being held in Long Beach, CA. It’s the first time we’ve been to this meeting which brings together over 1,600 researchers. We hope to meet scientists who are interested in Progenesis CoMet and Progenesis LC-MS for lipidomics, small molecule research and AOCS members who are doing proteomics.

6th AO HUPO Congress

The meeting of the Asia Pacific and Oceania branch of HUPO is taking place in Beijing, starting on May 5th. We are attending with our Chinese distributor, Cloud Scientific Technology who have been selling the Progenesis software for 3 years and are based in Shanghai.

Will Dracup, CEO of Nonlinear, is giving a talk on Monday 7th May at 15:50 in the Bioinformatics: Databases, Post-translation Modifications, Quantification and Validation session. The title of his talk is, “A Radical New Approach to Proteomic Experiment Design and Execution that Maximises the Likelihood of Clinical Impact.”

This talk will introduce the challenges of running proteomics experiments and the practical steps that can be taken to help overcome the challenges of reproducibility. It will present the results obtained applying these techniques in a urology clinic.

I hope you can make it to Will’s talk.

60th ASMS (American Society of Mass Spectrometry) Conference

This year, starting on May 20th, ASMS is being held in Vancouver, Canada and promises to be a big event for Nonlinear. The meeting attracts more than 6,500 scientists and nearly 3,000 papers are presented as posters and talks. We’re looking forward to catching up with some of our Progenesis customers and seeing some of their work presented during the course of the meeting.

ASMS provides an excellent opportunity to see the latest MS technology, and much more, as many instrument vendors take up hospitality suites which are open after the exhibit hall closes. It can be a punishing schedule – thank goodness it only happens once a year!

We hope that you can join us at one of these meeting. Keep an eye on the blog as I’ll update you on some of the summer meetings. Maybe we’re attending one close to you?

ProteoMMX 2.0 “Strictly Quantitative”

Last week I attended the ProteoMMX 2.0 meeting here in my home town of Chester with my colleague, Martin Wells. Chester is a very beautiful old city, full of Roman archeological remains, which contrasted with the cutting edge scientific program and presentations. 

Prof. Rob Beynon opened the meeting with a bit of history. A reminder about the first meeting 2 years ago, which was disrupted by the Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull.  This prevented speakers from attending the meeting but at the eleventh hour speakers skyped in and gave their presentations.  This sums up the spirit of the ProteoMMX meeting, which is cosy, down-to-earth and inclusive.

This conference was themed ‘Strictly Quantitative’ and it was. The program was preceded by a Quantitative Proteomics and Data Analysis training course, organised by the Biochemical Society.  We participated in this course with a presentation on the challenges and solutions you face with relative quantification of proteins by 2D DIGE and label free LC-MS/MS. Specifically this covered:

• Experimental design that can answer the biological questions
• Like for like measure of abundance across all samples to make relative comparisons
• Correction for differences in sample loading
• Reliable measure of variance within experimental groups
• Statistical tools to confidently find differences that are significant and likely to be true
• Identification workflow to annotate the measured features
• Confirmation that other measurements are in consensus

There was a lot of interest, both from people just starting out in proteomics and those who have been addressing the pains of quantitative analysis for some time.  For me it was interesting to hear first-hand the issues that quantitative proteomics scientists face.  The word ‘challenging’ was one of the words I heard the most, although I think some scientists would have preferred to use some other words instead sometimes!

One presentation in the main program showed that, based on publication volume, the use of label-free workflows has taken over as the primary tool for proteomic quantitation. A summary of all the presentations can be found in the final abstract book. There were a lot of scientists using Progenesis LC-MS presenting at the event.  There was recognition of Progenesis LC-MS’s ability to handle large datasets and large sample numbers so that statistically meaningful results can be obtained.  This ties in with our passion for helping to improve reproducibility in proteomics and why we have cofounded the Fixing Proteomics campaign.

There were 28 posters including one from Andrew Porter, Northumbria University, a PhD student we sponsor. His poster demonstrated proteomic analysis of C. japonicas using 2D gels and label free LC-MS with gas phase fractionation. The conclusion was that the two techniques were complementary in uncovering this organism’s proteome.  If you are interested to read more, a copy of Andrew’s poster is available here and you can download both Progenesis SameSpots and Progenesis LC-MS to try with your own data.

The meeting was very well organised indeed and Waters hosted an evening reception for all the delegates at the wonderfully quirky ‘Oddfellows’.  This has the well known ‘upside down room’ pictured here.

It was at Oddfellows that I heard my favourite utterance of the conference.  This was when I introduced two scientists to each other and they realised they had both worked at the same institute but at different times.  “I purified an enzyme there!!!”.  Pure proteomics pleasure.

Round up of ABRF 2012

The theme of this year’s ABRF meeting was the technology behind the stories, which all good science communications should tell.  Core facility managers and staff, mainly from North America but others from all over the world, came together in Disney’s Contemporary Resort, Orlando, Florida to learn about the technologies available to support them. It was also an opportunity to get together and share experiences of running core operations.

The talks were broadly split equally into a genomics and proteomics focus. Our interest and involvement was in quantitative proteomics. The meeting covered the challenges it poses for core facility managers and their customers as well as the solutions to support designing and running quantitative proteomics experiments.

The majority of the talks covered labelling and label-free strategies for LC-MS/MS.

Shabaz Mohammed (Biomolecular Mass Spectrometry & Proteomics group, Utrecht University) and Karl Mechtler (Mass Spectrometry & Protein Chemistry, Research Institute of Molecular Pathology, Vienna) each gave presentations based on labelling strategies. The first compared SILAC, dimethyl and TMT labelling using the criteria of (a) number of identified proteins (b) part of the proteome that is accessible (c) precision. While there was a high correlation between all three, TMT came out as the relative winner, especially in terms of precision. However, it was also stressed that chemical noise is an issue for all three labelling strategies, which affects reliable quantitation.

Karl’s presentation focussed on the use of iTRAQ but his first slide showed the rapid rise of label-free quantification. Based on  the number of publications, the use of label-free techniques was projected above all the labelling strategies in 2012.

The use of label-free quantitative LC-MS is of interest to many core facilities due to it’s relatively low cost. Spectral counting was presented as the simplest way to achieve this, especially when you just want to compare lists of proteins present/absent between groups. However, while this broad view is relatively easy to achieve it generates more questions than answers for core facility customers.  This is when ion intensity based label-free quantitation can help get more from your data. 

We hosted a tutorial session including a presentation by Julian Whitelegge from UCLA covering this topic. He shared his experiences of translating facility users from relatively simple protein identification experiments to more sophisticated label-free quantification experiments based on ion intensity. It generated the most questions in the session and concluded that:

• Quantitative proteomics is an educational process
• There are many challenges to successful analyses in real biomedical experiments but…
• Powerful tools, including Progenesis LC-MS, are available to help, although samples must meet reasonable standards
• Experimental design must include statistical considerations

Over 60 people turned up to hear Julian talk as well as the other two presenters. We started with Will Dracup, from Nonlinear Dynamics and Biosignatures. He set the scene talking about the fundamental challenges you face with any quantitative proteomics experiment and how to overcome them. This was based on the messages we have developed as part of the Fixing Proteomics Campaign. After Julian’s presentation, Juan Chavez from the Bruce Lab, University of Washington finished the session with a talk on considerations for quantitative proteomics data. This focussed on the use of randomisation to eliminate bias, using enough replicates to build statistical power and how to select the right significance threshold. All these talks will be made available on the ABRF website shortly.

Posters

As well as the main programme there were 100 posters displayed. The Research Groups, for which ABRF is well known, presented results of their latest studies. These included posters from:

• Proteomics Standards Research Rroup with the development of a standard to support PTM analysis
• Antibody Technology Research Group showing the challenges of finding the “perfect” antibody
• Proteomics Research Group cataloguing the critical variables that influence LC-MS/MS data quality 

There was a common theme of quality control and the use of standards covered in other posters. Notably, two from ProteoRed who have become synonymous with running multi-centre proteomics studies. They demonstrated metrics and approaches you can use to benchmark your LC-MS/MS and SRM systems.  Alex Campos from the Proteomics Core Facility, won one of four Waters sponsored ABRF poster awards for the poster “ProteoRed MultiCenter Experiment for Long-term Quality Control Evaluation of Proteomics Core Facilities.”

The venue

It would be hard to talk about ABRF 2012 without mentioning its location, The Walt Disney World Resort.  It was a great experience being there but hard to stay focussed on the science with so many fun distractions around. However, since the theme of the conference was the technology behind the stories, Disney was a relevant location!  You can see pictures of the event with the official ABRF photos. Next year the meeting will be held in Palm Springs, California (March 2-5, 2013) and the focus will be tools for the advancement of converging science.

  

News from the German and Polish MS meeting in Poznan, Poland

This year the German mass spectrometry meeting was for the first time a joint meeting with the Polish  mass spectrometry society. The motivation was to strengthen the relationships between German and Polish research groups and to start new collaborations as well if possible. The meeting was held in the beautiful town of Poznan and there were around 400 participants mainly coming from Germany and Poland. One of the plenary lectures was held by the former ambassador of Poland in Germany, Andrzej Byrt and he gave a nice overview about the common history of our two countries.

Another memorable part was the presentation of Friedrich Lottspeich, who got an award together with Helmut Meyer and Roland Kellner for their merits in organizing the Arbeitstagung in Martinsried for the past 18 years, an event where Nonlinear also participated since 2002. The spirit of this meeting in Martinsried has been really unique and Prof. Lottspeich gave an entertaining summary of the Martinsried highlights since 1994.

My colleague, Agnès Corbin, attended the meeting with me and a highlight for us both was the presentation of Stefan Tenzer from Mainz University which was very encouraging. He did a comparison of several label-free software packages on the market using a Meta-Proteome Quantification standard and various MS hardware. We were delighted to see that Progenesis LC-MS gave the best results with Orbitraps. In addition it was also good to see that researchers from Waters used Progenesis LC-MS in one of their posters. There were also some queries about our new Metabolomics software Progenesis CoMet so in summary this has been a good meeting for Nonlinear.

Next year the German Mass Spec meeting will take place  in Berlin, organized by the group of Prof. Michael Linscheid from Humbold University so that will be a nice opportunity to visit the German capital again.

My next conference in 2012 is the Arbeitstagung which will be hosted for the first time at the Ruhr-University in Bochum, June 25th – 27th. It is hoped that the partial switch in the official language from German to English will open up new opportunities for additional speakers and more international interactions. There is more information on the website.

So I look forward to seeing you there, and maybe in Berlin next year!

A new version of Progenesis CoMet for metabolomics data analysis

Right now, we have a beta version of Progenesis CoMet v2.0 that we’d love to share with you. The first version was launched back in May 2011 and since then we have been working hard to improve it based on your feedback.

It continues to solve the main challenges you face, by giving you confidence in quantitative results and providing a single unified workflow for metabolomics data analysis. However, a major change is that the software now deconvolutes the different ions formed during experimental analysis of metabolites, recombining them to provide accurate measurements of each compound. This massively reduces the complexity of generating reliable compound identifications of biological interest.

I’ll cover the important changes in v2.0 here, including deconvolution of compound ions, but you can see it for yourself by asking for a demo.

The Progenesis CoMet v2.0 workflow

Progenesis CoMet is platform independent; it analyses data from Thermo, Agilent, Bruker and Waters instruments. It also supports the mzXML, mzML and NetCDF cross-vendor file formats. Prior to data import you are now prompted to select from a list of possible adducts present in your samples. If a specific adduct is not listed, it can easily be added to the list.

Next comes accurate retention time alignment, which lies at the heart of all Progenesis software. The result is that all compound ions are in the same location and co-detected across all sample runs to produce a complete data set. No missing values means data satisfies the conditions for valid multivariate statistical tests.

Peak picking
Once you have organised your runs into the correct experiment design, you can apply peak picking. You can change the peak picking parameters to ensure optimal detection for each experiment. The new peak picking screen has the added advantage of displaying an ion intensity map of the results, so you can review this and optimise before proceeding.

I should say the same peak picking algorithm from v1.0 is used to detect compound ions in complex samples, including overlapping compound ions, which helps generate accurate quantification data.

Reviewing compounds
This is where the results of quantification and identification are automatically brought together. All the compound ions are automatically deconvoluted to provide accurate quantitation of each compound. Here you can find the compounds of biological interest based on differences in abundance, Anova p-values between experimental groups and other measurements. The Review Compounds screen has been enhanced with a 3D view, a feature to automatically accept a compound identification based on a search score threshold and a visual display of isotope peak distribution.

Identifying compounds
We have developed a brand new search tool, MetaScope, integrated into the software. In a single-click you can search your own data and return compound identifications directly back into the workflow. It is that easy! You can run a search of neutral mass, or m/z along with retention time data against a flat file of compound identifications that you curate. The results, with a MetaScope compound identification score applied, are automatically associated with the compounds in Progenesis CoMet.

You also have the added flexibility of searching for compound identifications by:

• export exact mass and RT data via a .csv file
• export data to perform a METLIN search.

We can responsively support any new search options required by developing plug-ins to suit your own workflows. If you have something in mind, simply ask us.

Reviewing deconvolution
The Review Deconvolution screen allows you to review the quantified compounds, including any identification results, in terms of the component compound ions. The compound’s ions are displayed in a montage of ion map areas, with locations of missing adduct forms also shown. Mass spectra and extracted ion chromatograms are also displayed for each compound ion, so you can see how they similar they are. This is useful in visually checking the quality of data underlying each quantified compound.

If any compounds have an ion whose profile appears as an outlier in terms of its m/z and RT characteristics, within expected limits, it can be removed. Likewise, you have the opportunity to look if a compound ion appears at an expected position on the ion intensity map and, if it is present, add it to the compound quantification calculation.

Finally, you can export data to perform further analysis e.g. pathway analysis as well as explore your data in even greater detail with Progenesis Stats. This includes Principal Components Analysis, Correlation Analysis, False Discovery Rate q-values and now a view of how adduct abundance varies between runs.

Progenesis CoMet v2.0 beta in summary…

Progenesis CoMet is designed to give you confidence in results from quantitative analysis of metabolomics data in discovery experiments. It does this using a simple workflow that avoids the need for working with multiple, disjointed, external tools. The result is that you can reliably quantify and then identify relative differences in compound abundance that help explain the biological changes within your samples.

If you would like to see Progenesis CoMet v2.0 (beta) and trial it on your own data, contact us and we can arrange this with you.

Welcome to Anjum Ahmed, strengthening our testing team

As the capabilities of the Progenesis range continue to expand, the task of monitoring and maintaining the software’s quality expands accordingly. Consequently, we’re delighted to welcome Anjum Ahmed to Nonlinear. Anjum’s a senior test analyst with 9 years’ experience and will be helping to make sure the software we release meets and exceeds the standards that our customers have come to expect. She’s also worked in Agile development teams before – the same, responsive approach we use at Nonlinear – so we should be a great fit for each other and are looking forward to working with her.

Welcome to the team, Anjum!

Interested in a career at Nonlinear?

Even when our Careers page doesn’t list any explicit job vacancies, we’re always interested to hear from anyone who thinks they can strengthen our team, whether you’re in marketing, sales, a bioinformatician, or a software developer. So, if you’d like to join us here at Nonlinear and think you can add something extra to the mix, send your CV/résumé and an introduction to jobs@nonlinear.com. Who knows – you could be the next new starter to feature here…

Learn how to overcome the problems of quantitative proteomics experiments

Following on from Beth’s last blog post I have more details of our Tutorial Session (T5), which is being held on Tuesday 20th March (4:30pm -5:45pm) at the ABRF 2012 meeting in Orlando, Florida.

The title of the tutorial session is Overcoming problems with experiment design for quantitative proteomics and, after a call with all the speakers on Friday, it is shaping up to be a great set of talks.

ABRF 2012 takes place at Disney’s Contemporary Resort

What you will hear at our tutorial session

The brief from the ABRF organising committee was to “provide a session with speakers that would highlight the challenges of experiment design and the statistical analysis of ‘omics data.” They also said “people should leave the session having learnt something they can take back to their lab, share and apply to their research.” So, we have organised the talks into a sequence, adding more detail to the subject as each one is presented.

We’ll start with a high level view from Will Dracup, Chairman and founder of Nonlinear Dynamics, on the major challenges you face in designing and running good proteomics experiments. This will include some fundamental concepts you need to bear in mind from the start and what a good proteomics experiment means.

Following this, Julian Whitelegge Ph.D. who leads the proteomics division of the Pasarow Mass Spectrometry Laboratory at UCLA, will talk on introducing inexperienced users to label-free quantitative proteomics. He will share their experiences in helping to transition facility users and collaborators from protein identification experiments to quantitative LC-MS proteomics experiments. 

Finally, we will have a talk by Juan Chavez, Ph.D. from The Bruce Lab at the University of Washington, a lab that focuses on development of advanced mass spectrometry technology for proteomics, biological and biomedical applications. This presentation will focus on a SILAC experiment to measure expression level differences between drug resistant and drug sensitive HeLa cells. The example will demonstrate good experiment design and how to approach statistical analysis of ‘omics data.

I’ll be tweeting (follow @NonlinearDotCom) before and during the event with any interesting developments. A blog post reviewing the ABRF 2012 meeting and our tutorial session will follow. So be sure to connect with us and find out more.

If you still haven’t registered to attend ABRF 2012, the details are here. It would be great to meet you at our booth or at the tutorial session if you do attend.

Looking ahead to some 2012 events

The start of 2012 has been a very busy time for us in terms of organising our attendance at conferences which are taking place all over the world. I have been making final arrangements for events being held over the next couple of months, and booking up meetings for later in 2012.

Our first conference in Europe this year is the Joint Conference of Polish MS Society and German MS Society  4th – 7th March. Usually the German MS Society (DGMS) have their own annual meeting, but this year they are having a joint meeting with their Polish counterparts in Poznan, Poland.  We will be represented by Leo Pollack and Agnès Corbin, so please visit us to see the latest developments in the Progenesis software range, including a preview of the next Progenesis CoMet release.

 

Following on from this, our next conference is across the Atlantic in Orlando, Florida. ABRF 2012 – Learning from Biomolecules, The Technology Behind the Story is being held at Disney’s Contemporary Resort, March 17th – 20th. The focus of the meeting is the cutting edge technologies that drive scientific research, and how to implement these techniques in core facilities.

One of the highlights of the meeting for us is the T5 Tutorial Session – Overcoming Problems with Experiment Design for Quantitative Proteomics. It is being held on  Tuesday 20th March, 4:30pm – 5:45pm, and will be hosted by my colleague, Paddy Lavery.  There are presentations from Nonlinear’s founder and CEO, Will Dracup, Julian Whitelegge Ph.D from UCLA and the session closes with a presentation by Juan Chavez, from the Bruce Lab, University of Washington.

The workshop aims to highlight the challenges of experiment design and the statistical analysis of ‘omics data. We hope that the people who attend the workshop will learn more about how to do reliable and reproducible proteomics experiments.

Please let us know if you would like more information about this, or any of the other conferences we are attending in early 2012.

Looking forward to the rest of the year, we recently confirmed our attendance at the following conferences:

103rd AOCS Annual Meeting & Expo

29th April – 2nd May 2012

Long Beach, California, US

More information

60th ASMS Conference on Mass Spectrometry and Allied Topics

20th – 24th May 2012

Vancouver, BC, Canada

More information

HUPO 11th Annual World Congress

9th – 13th September, 2012

Boston, MA, US

More information

This is just a selection of the conferences we will attend over the next few months, you can see the full, up-to-date list on our website, or keep in touch with us on the blog.

Thanks