Speaker: Ronald L. Schnaar, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

Topic: Expanding the Molecular Horizon: Integrative Mass Spectrometry Strategies for Spatial Omics and Neurodegenerative Disease Research

Date: Monday, October 20, 2025

Time: 6:15 pm Dinner, 7:15 pm Presentation

Location: Shimadzu Scientific Instrument, Inc. Training Center 7100 Riverwood Drive, Columbia, MD 21046 (Directions) This will be an in-person meeting.

Dinner: Please RSVP to Sheng Feng (SFeng@som.umaryland.edu) by Friday, October 17 if you will be attending the dinner.

Abstract: Every living cell carries distinctive covalent groupings of sugars, glycans, carried on glycoproteins and glycolipids mainly on their cell surfaces. In humans glycans are composed primarily of just nine sugars in specific linkages and patterns biosynthesized by a family of ~215 glycosyltransferases, the expression and specificity of which limit and define the human glycome. In part, glycans are involved in molecular recognition and cell regulation via their engagement with complementary glycan binding proteins, also called lectins. Deciphering this “sugar code” has the potential to provide a more complete understanding of cell signaling regulation and furnish novel opportunities for therapeutic development. Mass spectrometry has played an outsized role in glycomics and in defining the glycan-protein interactome. This talk will explore these themes via a series of vignettes from our studies aimed at identifying endogenous glycans that drive human biology via glycan-protein interactions, including recent work that developed bifunctional glycan tools to capture and identify a subset of the glycan-protein interactome.

Gold Sponsor Talk
Robust Start for Confident Results with AFA® – A Comprehensive Sample Prep Workflow for Protein Analysis
Debadeep Bhattacharyya Ph.D.
Sr. Director – Distribution (APAC, LatAm, Canada), Global Protein Analysis
Covaris, Woburn, MA, USA
dBhattacharyya@covaris.com

Significant advances in the world of Proteomics have not only revealed several protein biomarkers that can be used for disease monitoring but also helped in establishing workflows for routine monitoring. However, complexity in matrices (from fresh frozen tissue samples to FFPE, from cells to organoids and many more) continue to pose severe challenges that are not readily addressed by the advanced instruments used for end-detection technologies. While better and more data can be beneficial – identification, characterization, and quantification of proteins that are extracted, purified and digested from complex biological matrices can be complicated, if not inefficient with the traditional sample preparation methods. Adaptive Focused Acoustics® (AFA®) Technology has gained widespread popularity in the world of protein analysis. In here, we report comprehensive, robust, and fast AFA based workflows for extraction, purification and accelerated digestion of proteins starting with a host of varied complex biological matrices. The workflows are scalable and can support small to high throughput sample requirements.

Speaker: Lingjun Li, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Topic: Expanding the Molecular Horizon: Integrative Mass Spectrometry Strategies for Spatial Omics and Neurodegenerative Disease Research

Date: Monday, September 15, 2025

Time: 6:00 pm Dinner and Vendor Night, 7:15 pm Presentation

Location: Shimadzu Scientific Instrument, Inc. Training Center 7100 Riverwood Drive, Columbia, MD 21046 (Directions) This will be an in-person meeting.

Dinner: Please RSVP to Sheng Feng (SFeng@som.umaryland.edu) by Friday, September 12 if you will be attending the dinner.

Abstract: Understanding the molecular complexity of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD) requires analytical platforms that can capture both chemical diversity and spatial context. In this keynote, I will present our lab’s recent advances in mass spectrometry (MS)-based technologies that enable multidimensional molecular mapping across scales—from biofluids to single cells and intact tissues.
We have developed a suite of multiplexed isobaric and isotopic tagging strategies, including the high-resolution 12-plex and 18-plex DiLeu and SUGAR tags, to achieve simultaneous quantitation of proteins, peptides, lipids, and glycans. These tools have been applied to cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) samples from cognitively healthy individuals and AD patients, revealing stage-specific glycosylation patterns and glycoform microheterogeneity with implications for biomarker discovery.
To complement molecular profiling, we have advanced spatial omics through innovations in mass spectrometry imaging (MSI). Our single-cell MSI platform integrates dual-polarity ionization and ion mobility separation to enhance lipidome coverage at subcellular resolution. Furthermore, the Tissue Expansion Mass Spectrometry Imaging (TEMI) technique enables high-resolution mapping of metabolites, peptides, proteins, and glycans in expanded tissues, preserving spatial fidelity while increasing voxel throughput.
These integrative approaches have been applied to mouse models of AD and human postmortem brain tissues, generating region-specific biomolecular atlases that illuminate molecular alterations across disease progression. Our work underscores the power of MS-based spatial and structural omics to decode the biochemical landscape of complex diseases and guide therapeutic development.