The aim of the conference was to bring together chemists, physicists, geologists, art historians, conservators, archaeologists, etc. to create a wide community and a mutual environment for a fruitful discussion. Four days were filled with wide-ranging presentations, museum visits and interesting discussions with other scientist from the same scientific fields. The work of our cultural heritage group was also introduced with both oral and poster presentations.
On the left picture you can see Eliise standing next to her poster about the comparison of derivatization methods for GC-MS analysis of binding materials in oil paints. The results of this work are going to be published soon.
On the right picture is Pilleriin presenting her work on textile dye analysis. This work has already been submitted.
Every year Estonian University of Life Sciences organises a conference called “Healthy animal and healthy food” where Dr. Riin Rebane made a presentation “Fight against food fraud” which explained the ever-expanding role of analytical chemists in food science. Reasons for food fraud vary, but are almost always for monetary gain and therefore food fraud is in constant progress. One good example is honey analysis, where for decades there has been a change in methods in order to identify whether honey is real or whether it is identified with correct botanical or geographical origin. As a natural product, no two honeys are identical and this makes identification further more challenging for the chemists. One of the possible methods is amino acid analysis since the amino acid content can be like a fingerprint for honeys and in University of Tartu we have analysed few hundreds of Estonian honeys and have seen that that foreign honeys do differ in most cases and also that there is a correlation between the amino acid content and botanical origin. But nevertheless, even this method might not work every time and chemists are looking towards methods such as nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and even DNA-analysis to get better certainty for determining the origin of honey.
The summary based on the presentation was also reported in the newspaper Maaleht.
Dr. Anneli Kruve, a leader of research team focussing on ionization efficiency studies in electrospray, is currently a Humboldt fellow in Freie Universität Berlin and visited the 1st European Mass Spectrometry Conference in Saarbrücken (Germany) this month. She describes some of the highlights of this conference in her blog, you can read the post below.
Last week I had a chance to take part in the European Mass Spectrometry Conference that was hosted by DGMS (German Society for Mass Spectrometry) and SFSM (French Society for Mass Spectrometry). Below I share a few key ideas from this nice conference that took place in Saarbrücken over 5 days.
The conference was opened with a plenary lecture by Prof. Alain van Dorsselaer who summarized the main work he and his group has done on mass spec during the last 30 years. One of the key ideas, that came up several times in his talk referred to the fact that endless possibilities are accompanied by extreme data load. The amount of data in LC/MS/MS is huge and it is very complicated to analyse these massive data sets. Several other scientists, including Prof. Andreas Roempp and his group, also stressed the importance of transparent and open source data analyses and storage that could eventually simplify the data treatment. These ideas strongly resonate with my own ideas of applying more data science tools in primary data treatment in mass spectrometry, as today the data processing is by far limiting the progress in several fields of analytical mass spectrometry. Mostly this is the case for fields, where the science is still in the “discovery” stage; meaning that the scientists aim at finding the important compounds and yet do not know which these compounds could be. Such fields include metabolomics, proteomics, environmental science, etc.
Prof. Philippe Schmitt Kopplin stressed the importance of high throughput in metabolic sample analyses and explained why dissolve-and-shoot approach (flow-injection or infusion combined with MS) is often most practical. Also, he showed several case studies where marker compounds could be reliably identified with this simple approach if accompanied with efficient and accurate data processing. A particularly interesting example was a case study of 170-year-old wine from the bottom of the Baltic Sea.
Prof. Carsten Engelhard showed an extremely clever, almost brilliant, method to analyse nanoparticles with simple dilution & infusion experiment. The infusion of homogeneous solution to ICP-MS instrument causes an almost constant signal with small random variations. However, if the solution of nanoparticles is infused to ICP-MS, most of the time there is no signal (only noise). When one of the nanoparticles enters the plasma a signal suddenly occurs causing a peak in the chronogram. The height of the signal reflects the size of the nanoparticle and the number of peaks per volume indicates the concentration of the nanoparticles.
Prof. Thomas Kraemer introduced us to the world of forensic analyses. Particularly, he focused on MALDI imaging techniques, that allow revealing drug intake or exposure to toxic compounds. For this purpose his lab is using two types of samples, the traditional hair and lately also toenails, to overcome the problem arising for hairless people. Interestingly, the single hair analysis also reveals time-resolved information with high precision; therefore, allowing to distinguish between one-time and long time exposures.
You can check out more posts from our team studying ionization efficiencies kruvelab.com
The reception of this talk was one of the warmest during the meeting! Several participants came later to say words of thank for offering such a valuable resource to the LC-MS community. There were also some interesting ideas proposed regarding topics that could be covered in the online course. LC-MS and MiC issues, such as validation, are among core competences of the UT Analytical Chemistry research group. The tutorial review, the on-line course, as well as the ValChrom software together form a nice outcome of joining these competences together.
Concerning the topics of the meeting in general, they were remarkably diverse and not so heavily dominated by biomedical MS as is often the case at mass spectrometry meetings. Interesting presentations were given on gas-phase ion processes, different laser techniques in MS (e.g. for analysis of solids without sample preparation), advanced catalysis studies by MS, LC-ICP-DRC-MS for trace element speciation, the possibility of making a high-end LC-HRMS system an “open access” system within an organization, etc.
The presentation outlines the recent results by Pilleriin in creating the method for quick, easy and non-destructive classification and semi-quantitative analysis of textiles using ATR-FT-IR spectroscopy combined with chemometric data analysis methods.
She investigated altogether 89 individual textile materials – Wool, Silk, Cotton, Linen, Cellulose acetate, Lyocell/Tenzel, Viscose, Polyester fibre, Polyamide fibre, Polyacrylic fibre, Elastane and their different combinations – and created a discrimination/classification model using principal component analysis (Image on the right).
Classification of textiles by ATR-FT-IR and principal component analysis, PCA (single-fibre model)
The presentation led to a number of new contacts and invitation to next events. Participants were impressed by the breadth of activities as well as by the very strong team working on these things at UT. In addition, Ivo Leito was interviewed by the Croatian national television.
On Wednesday 12.10.16 the EcoBalt 2016 conference – first time organized in Tartu, Estonia – finished successfully! 42 oral talks and 43 posters were offered to the more than 150 participants from more than 25 countries. The conference featured two tutorial sessions – on measurement uncertainty and on validation of LC/MS analytical methods. The mesmerizing introductory multimedia presentation by Sven Zacek about Estonian nature and the stunning closure talk about “impossible things” by Meelika Hirmo from Let’s Do It! World were certainly among the highlights of the conference.
A number of AMS and EACH students participated in the conference.
We thank all the participants for making EcoBalt 2016 a success!
EcoBalt 2016 was organized by the University of Tartu with Tallinn University of Technology and Estonian Environmental Research Centre.
EcoBalt2016 received financial support from a number of sources. We thank all supporters! Without their help the conference would not have been possible.
For organisation of international events and conferences from Estonian Ministry of Economic Affairs and Infrastructure in cooperation with the Enterprise Estonia tourism development centre from funding provided by the European Union Regional Development Fund.
Second day of the conference was fully supported by Environmental Investment Centre.
The following companies supported the conference: LaboChema, Ramboll, Ordior, Quantum, SyntPot, HNK, Waters, Armgate and LanLab.
The EcoBalt conference series has traditions dating back to 1993 and has been envisaged from the beginning as a Baltic event. Nevertheless, this is the first time that it takes place in Estonia (previously only in Latvia and Lithuania).
We are very glad to welcome more than 160 registered participants from more than 25 countries, making it a truly international conference! The nearby countries are represented as well as e.g. Philippines, Mexico, India, China, Nepal, Sri Lanka, … A number of EACH students also participate in EcoBalt 2016!
The EcoBalt 2016 programme is very diverse: topics ranging from ultramodern environmental analytical techniques to environmental management and from nanoparticles in environment to global climate change.
EcoBalt 2016 is organised jointly by UT in collaboration with TTU and Estonian Environmental Research Centre in the framework of the ECAC consortium.
The presentation outlined the contents and organisation of the material in the on-line course Estimation of measurement uncertainty in chemical analysis, the different ways of using the on-line material (for independent learning, for self-testing, as an information source and as a basis for running as a MOOC) and the experience of running it as a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) at University of Tartu during the three MOOC editions in 2014 to 2016. An important part of the presentation was devoted to analyzing the pros and cons of MOOCs as a way of teaching and in particular as a way of teaching analytical chemistry (or its subdisciplines). It was concluded that MOOCs do have advantages, especially if compared to short training courses for practitioners. The talk created quite some interest and discussions after the session.
Preparation of a new MOOC course Validation of LC-MS analysis methods is currently underway by the group of analytical chemistry. The materials of the LC-MS validation course are nearing completion and are already available online.
We are glad to announce that the EcoBalt 2016 programme has been converging nicely – we have now a lot of interesting presenters! At the same time there are still free slots so that we continue to accept abstracts both for oral and poster presentations. The conference takes place in Tartu (Estonia) during 9.-12. October 2016.
In addition to the scientific content the EcoBalt 2016 conference will be hosting two tutorial classes with the following topics:
— Tutorial on measurement uncertainty (Oct 09, 2016)
— Tutorial on LC/MS method validation (Oct 12, 2016)
Both of these will be interactive sessions oriented towards solving practical questions, making decisions in measurement uncertainty and validation, performing calculations, etc. The tutorials assume basic knowledge of the topics – measurement uncertainty and validation, respectively. There is no extra fee for the tutorial classes – the conference fee covers also the tutorials. If you are interested in participation in one or both tutorial classes, please register to the EcoBalt 2016 conference.
If any questions, do not hesitate to contact the local organizers, Dr Riin Rebane (riin.rebane@ut.ee) or Prof Ivo Leito (ivo.leito@ut.ee).
EcoBalt 2016 is an environmental science conference, with a strong focus on environmental analytical chemistry and metrology/quality aspects of analytical measurements and there will be a special session there dedicated to these topics.