From the 9th to the 13th of September MSACL EU 2018 Annual Congress took place in the cosy city of Salzburg, Austria. This conference was designed to mass spectrometry audience mainly focusing on clinical applications.  I had the opportunity to participate in this inspiring conference. Moreover, I had the possibility to give a talk. I introduced our studies on standard substance free quantitation in LC/ESI/MS analysis.

Lightning talks to encourage young scientists

Prof. Jerzy Adamski kicked off the conference with the plenary lecture on the topic “Metabolomics Messages on Human Health and Diseases”. As one of the main goals of this conference is to inspire and encourage the young scientists the next session was lightning talks. Poster presenters had 90 seconds and one slide to present their research and cultivate interest in their topic. Additional possibility to get to know mature scientist was the program “meet the experts”. There were short meetings as well as booth and poster tours with experts. I had the possibility to analyze some posters together with Dr. Oleg Mayboroda from Leiden University Medical Centre. It was nice to see how the experts look at the posters and how and which questions they ask. Dr. Mayboroda gave a checklist of how to assess the goodness of the PCA plot presented on posters.

Scientific highlights of the conference

There were 5 parallel sessions every day. For me, the three highlights were as follows.  First of all, Dr. Mario Thevis gave a talk about mass spectrometry in sports drug testing. Also, Prof. David Millington gave an interesting talk about the role of tandem mass spectrometry in newborn screening. It was encouraging to see how the methods developed by his team save around 2500 newborns on yearly basis. Furthermore, Dr. Lyudmilla Yanshole gave a talk about using postmortem tissues for biomarker identification. It is an interesting study as for lots of diseases it is very difficult to get tissue of healthy species.

Standard substance free quantification LC/ESI/MS

I had the possibility to present for the first time a talk at an international conference. For that, I am most grateful for the MSACL organization and the scientific committee. I introduced the recent results on the feasibility of standard substance free (semi)quantitation in LC/ESI/MS using ionization efficiency prediction models. We have measured more than 2000 ionization efficiency values. We have incorporated 21 solvent compositions. The models are developed based on descriptors calculated from the 2D structure of compounds and the predictions perform well even in complex matrices, namely, bodily fluids. Our average misprediction of ionization efficiencies is less than 3.5 times mismatch.  I thank the audience for fruitful discussions on the topic.

Salzburg is a lovely city with stunning views of the Alps. Furthermore, the organizer made our stay at the conference very enjoyable with the nice coffee breaks and warm buffet for lunch and dinner which were offered every day.

From 26 to 31 of August Florence hosted a vast majority of mass spectrometry scientist in the course of 22nd International Mass Spectrometry Conference. Among these were also our group members researchers Anneli Kruve and Riin Rebane, PhD students Piia Liigand and Jaanus Liigand, MSc student Mari Ojakivi and a visiting PhD student Tingting Wang from the Technical University of Denmark. We had a chance to present altogether 5 posters at the conference. Our posters can be found here. As is the case for IMSC, the topics ranged as wide as it can be for mass spec and always there was something to see and hear. We were happy to see that there was a lot of interest in our work. Congratulations to Anneli, whose poster received Chemistry – A European journal poster award! The conference was accompanied by delicious Italian food and nice warm weather. We enjoyed every second of this highly intensive week and are looking forward to IMSC 2020 in Rio.

Anneli Kruve: It is no secret that I am very keen on non-target screening methods, so I really enjoyed all the talks and posters regarding non-target screening and compound identification. My favorite talk was actually also in the field of compound identification given by Prof. Rober Mistrik in the Thermo lunch seminar. He very nicely explained the Precursor Ion Fingerprinting strategy and explained some of the new tips and tricks which are now combined in the Mass Frontier 8.0. It also very strongly resonated with the perspective I recently wrote about semi-quantitative non-target screening. I also have to mention the plenary lecture by Prof. Marco Leona from Metropolitan Museum of Art, who did not focus specifically on mass spec but gave us a really nice overview of scientific research of art. I constantly kept thinking how beautiful it is to have a background in chemistry: one can, virtually, combine all interest and make a great new whole. Prof. Leona, for example, was combining beautiful artworks, history of humankind, the biology of colorful bugs and plants, and on top of that mass spectrometry. And I definitely also felt honored to receive my best poster prize awarded by Chemistry – A European Journal!

Riin Rebane: It was my first experience of Florence as well as IMSC and when the first one greeted with wonderful food, the second one gave food for thought. It was a thorough overview of the latest advances in mass spectrometry and an insight into different works of scientists from academia as well as industry, therefore, it was certainly a challenge to grasp it all. But despite that, it was also nice to see that sessions towards practical applications of mass spectrometry in for example food or environmental analysis, were so popular that arriving late meant that all seats were already taken by other enthusiasts.

Mari Ojakivi: IMSC 2018 was the first scientific conference that I attended and as a master’s student it was an eye-opening experience. It was very nice to see so many scientists introducing their brilliant work with a mass spec. Seeing all the different applications in forensics, food and environmental science, as well as fundamental research in all the -omics fields made me understand how powerful tool mass spectrometry is. What is more, presenting my own work and seeing other scientists being so interested in it, verified that I am doing good and important science.

Piia Liigand: I thoroughly enjoyed the IMSC 2018 in Florence. It was a nice opportunity to meet and talk to scientists from all over the world. I was also very positively surprised to see so much interest in my poster and I truly enjoyed the discussions I had while presenting my poster. Thanks to these discussions I now have even more understanding of the importance of the science we do and what to do next. I also enjoyed meeting friends from past conferences and catching up on their research in more detail. Of course, the food, wine and general ambiance of Florence was an excellent environment to do all that.

Jaanus Liigand: I enjoyed the IMSC 2018 in Florence as it offered a very wide set of different interesting topics of mass spectrometry field. The inspiring presentations, fruitful discussions, interdisciplinary ideas, and excellent community made it a very enjoyable conference. My favorite session was environmental MS where Prof. Susan Richardson gave in her keynote a very nice overview of the recent developments in this field followed by interesting presentations. Additionally, I enjoyed meeting friends from previous conferences and discussing their and our research. Of course, the historical city – Florence – with the food and wine scenery made the week even more enjoyable.

Tingting Wang: It was a really memorable experience to participate IMSC in Florence, and I enjoyed the atmosphere and all the academic events there. It’s so impressive how wide are the application fields that mass spectrometry can do in the world by looking through a thousand posters. It’s hard to say which presentation or poster was my favorite, but I do pay more attention to the non-target screening strategy applied in food control, environmental, metabolomics, and proteomics study, especially the workshop on the second day about non-target analysis. It was interesting and very informative because unknown screening by high-resolution mass spectrometry is the topic of my PhD project, how to combine target and non-target screening, how to develop a more precise identification and quantification strategy for the non-target even unknowns, and how to prioritize unknowns are the problems I am always facing. It is nice that I could see these similar studies with various workflows from other researchers, and have the chance to listen to their presentations and even talk with those people to get inspiration for my research.