2023 Young Investigator Travel Awards

The Washington-Baltimore Mass Spectrometry Discussion Group (WBMSDG) is pleased to announce that applications are now being accepted for the 2023 Young Investigator Travel Awards. Awards will be granted to outstanding young investigators at the undergraduate or graduate student level to support travel to the 71st ASMS Conference. Undergraduate and graduate students in laboratories and institutions traditionally associated with the WBMSDG in the following geographic regions are encouraged to apply: from Richmond and Charlottesville, VA to the South and Newark, DE to the North.

Three awards will be given. 1st place: $650, 2nd place: $550, 3rd place: $450.

Complete applications consist of the following items:
1. Travel Grant 2023 Application form (includes a checklist)
2. Electronic copy of ASMS abstract
3. Evidence of abstract acceptance by ASMS indicating the presentation format (poster or oral)
4. Curriculum Vitae or Resume
5. Two-page summary of research project (figures can be included)
6. Letter of recommendation from advisor

Applicants should submit items 1-5 listed above as a single PDF file to Dr. Dapeng Chen. Item 6 must be sent directly by the applicant’s advisor to Dr. Dapeng Chen:

Dapeng Chen, PhD
WBMSDG co-chair
dapeng.chen@zeteotech.com

The deadline for applications is 5 PM EST on Friday, April 28th, 2023. A panel of WBMSDG members will act as reviewers. Please note, previous winners are encouraged to apply if the award application for the upcoming ASMS conference significantly differs from the previously successful application. In the event that ASMS is cancelled, awards will be given out as well as prize amounts up to the full award to cover any incurred costs associated with ASMS travel. Successful applicants will be expected to give a 10-minute oral presentation at the post-ASMS WBMSDG meeting on June 23rd, 2023 at Shimadzu Scientific in Columbia, MD.

5th Annual North American Mass Spectrometry Summer School

June 10-13, 2023, Madison, WI

Over a dozen world leading experts in mass spectrometry for this three-day course to provide our students, both from academia and industry, an engaging and inspiring program covering the latest in the application of mass spectrometry to omic analyses. Tutorial lectures range from mass analyzers to the basics of data analysis. There is no cost to participate.

Registration closes on April 1, 2023 or when capacity is reached: https://www.ncqbcs.com

MassSpecSummerSchool2023

March Meeting

Speaker: Robert Cole, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

Topic: What’s on your albumin?

Date: Monday, March 20, 2023

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. Attendees are required to show a vaccine card (either at the door or in advance using the web form) . If you have submitted your vaccine card before, your status is already recorded.

Dinner: Please RSVP to Andy Qi (andy.yue.qi@gmail.com) by Friday, March 17 if you will be attending the dinner.

Abstract: Environmental exposures contribute to chronic disease risk substantially more than heritable genetic variants. Outdoor air pollution is a complex environmental
mixture which is responsible for over 4 million deaths each year, an impact that is projected to rise over the next several decades. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has declared outdoor air pollution to be Group 1 human carcinogen. Outdoor air is a complex mixture of volatile organic toxins and carcinogens (e.g., aldehydes and benzene), sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and particulate matter. Assessing personal exposure to environmental toxicants in complex mixtures, such as outdoor air pollution, is a critical challenge for predicting disease risk. Thus, developing and validating biomarkers which reveal exposure to these complex mixtures would advance individual risk analysis. Using human serum albumin (HSA)-based biomonitoring, we reported dosimetric relationships between adducts at HSA Cys34 and ambient air pollutant levels. However, modifications at other sites in HSA may reveal a great number of novel adducts and provide a panel of exposure biomarkers for disease risk. To bridge this gap, we developed a novel untargeted mass spectrometry-based method, termed Pan-Protein Adductomics (PPA),
to agnostically detect and quantify modifications at multiple residues in human serum albumin (HSA). Our PPA method combines nanoflow-liquid chromatography, gas-phase fractionation, overlapping-window data-independent acquisition, and high-resolution tandem mass spectrometry to assay modifications on HSA. Our initial application of PPA is to assess temporal changes in HSA modifications in non-smoking women exposed to high levels of outdoor air pollution. While we are currently focused on modifications in albumin, the PPA approach is applicable to any protein and may expand the knowledge base of protein modifications.

Thank you to our 2022-2023 sponsors!

Free Virtual Lipidomics Workshop

March 20-21, 2023, via Zoom

This fast-paced, interactive workshop will cover the fundamentals of lipid data acquisition, and data processing on a mass spectrometer. It is open to those who have at least 6 months of mass spec hands-on use and/or experience processing mass spec data.

This Zoom workshop will be a mix of lectures, demos and discussion, topics include:
Research Lecture by Alan Saghatelian of the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences
Chromatography and MS Acquisition Lecture
Method Setup on QExactive, Tribrid and Exploris Demo
Lipid Overview Lecture
Lipidex & Compound Discover Demo
Quality Control Lecture
Data Analysis Tools Lecture
Library Building Demo

APPLICATION CLOSES March 15 or when capacity is reached
Details can be found at https://www.ncqbcs.com/resources/training/lipidomics-training

LipidsWorkshopFlyer

February Meeting

Speaker: Zachary Goecker, NIST

Topic: Developing Reproducible Methods in Site-Specific Glycosylation Analysis

Date: Monday, February 27, 2023

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. Attendees are required to show a vaccine card (either at the door or in advance using the web form) . If you have submitted your vaccine card before, your status is already recorded.

Dinner: Please RSVP to Andy Qi (andy.yue.qi@gmail.com) by Friday, February 24 if you will be attending the dinner.

Abstract: Many proteins are glycosylated at multiple sites, and each site can contain complex
distributions of attached glycans. Until recently, reliable determinations of these distributions have not been possible. Instead, glycosylation analysis of glycoproteins has been primarily accomplished by releasing and identifying glycans, thereby losing all protein site-specific information. This glycomics approach works well for understanding the diversity of glycosylation in a digest, but does not answer questions relevant to site-specific structures (glycan microheterogeneity) and therefore is not as useful in determining direct functional implications. Recent developments in high resolution mass spectrometry have opened the door for the identification of intact glycopeptides. This study assesses methods in site-specific analysis of intact glycopeptides to demonstrate
reproducibility and measure variation in glycosylation quantitatively between different experimental factors. Here, we report the use of stepped HCD fragmentation, contingent ion scan, and many downstream data filters for the production of highly robust and reproducible glycosylation distribution spectra. In this presentation, we will report site-specific glycosylation profiles on glycoproteins from Sars-Cov-2, influenza, blood serum, and breastmilk. Results demonstrate that glycosylation profiles are highly reproducible among replicates and different digestion methods. However, glycosylation patterns do change based on factors such as source, proteins sequence, and glycosylation site.

Thank you to our 2022-2023 sponsors!