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!