BioPharmaSpec Chairman, Prof. Howard R. Morris, Visits the 72nd ASMS Conference in Anaheim, California
“My first attendance at an ASMS (the American Society of Mass Spectrometry) Meeting was in Dallas, Texas in June 1972 (52 years ago!) where, before the days of HPLC, I presented a strategy paper on “Protein Sequencing by the Mass Spectrometric Analysis of Peptide Mixtures”. Comparing the meeting content then to this year’s convention in Anaheim California, a lot has changed!
In Dallas and most other conventions I attended until about 15 or 20 years ago, when there was a sea-change, the emphasis of the presentations was on research and discovery from academia. In contrast at Anaheim, many of the oral presentations and posters were from mass spectroscopists working in industries such as big-pharma or the major instrument manufacturers or at least with them as partners. This, no doubt, is a consequence of where the money is now, with a dearth of funding going into academia comparatively, whether for basic research or for training the next generation of scientists. At Dallas ‘72 of course, we had not yet shown the power of Mass Spectrometry for biopolymer mapping and sequencing, nor had the recombinant protein engineering revolution got underway! It was to be another 10 years or so before real progress in those areas came to fruition.
At Anaheim, as always at ASMS, there were some brilliant speakers and I particularly enjoyed presentations by Professor Albert Heck, Utrecht, on Antibody Characterization to build antibody repertoires to inform personalised medicine and by Professor Dan Fabris, Connecticut, on Nucleic Acids Research, a field we entered into (as M-Scan) in Prof Jim McCloskey’s day (Utah) in the ‘80s and 90’s before the current excitement in RNA-based therapeutics was evident. Since then, we and others are now doubling down on our efforts following the explosion of research and pharma interest in DNA and RNA drug products.
With so many topics of interest in several parallel sessions the usual problem was how to get to all the ones you wanted to! Another good talk was from Professor Hakansson, Michigan on Ion-Electron reactions which reminded me of the first successful MS sequencing of protein-derived peptides which was on studies of Silk Fibroin by electron bombardment in 1968! Now of course ECD, EAD, EThcD etc are all finding new and powerful applications in biopolymer characterization, particularly for delicate Post-Translational Modifications (PTMs) such as O-linked glycoprotein sugars.
There was a significant emphasis on automated (software) interpretation of data, again much more so than in previous years, driven in part by high-throughput objectives and the sheer complexity of some datasets, particularly those derived from electron capture/dissociation fragmentation methods and/or “Top-Down” approaches to sequence determination. The first steps in the putative integration of AI were also being discussed in these sessions.
On a personal note, I was taken on a journey down memory lane when recognising the major contribution made by Q-TOF geometry instruments to many Anaheim presentations. More than 30 years ago, in the early 1990s, I conceived that novel geometry instrument, a Quadrupole orthogonal acceleration Time of Flight instrument, which I christened the Q-TOF, as a device which I predicted would easily out-perform the existing tandem mass spectrometer configurations of that era in providing ultra-high sensitivity unambiguous biopolymer sequencing of proteins and glycoproteins. As the Senior Biomolecular MS Consultant for Fisons/VG (later incorporated into Waters) at that time, I requested that they build the Q-TOF tandem instrument, but they preferred an alternative magnetic sector geometry, and it took a further three years of persuasion before the prototype Q-TOF was finally built in 1995 and I could test the theory in practice. The performance was as I had foreseen [Morris et al. Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry 10, 889-896 (1996), and Morris et al. Journal of Protein Chemistry 16, 469-479 (1997)].
At ASMS I was pleased and quietly proud that this concept has proved valuable after 30 years surviving into the design of the modern range of instruments incorporating the Q-TOF geometry, as shown in the work of many presenters at the Anaheim Congress. In addition to the Waters next generation Xevo G3 instruments, the exciting new Select Cyclic Ion Mobility instrument and newly announced Xevo MRT high resolution device, many other manufacturers have taken advantage of enhancing the power of the basic Q-TOF tandem innovation including Agilent, Shimadzu, SCIEX in the new Xeno 7600, and Brucker in the new tims-TOF instrument.
Overall, the standard and quality of the many oral and poster presentations was excellent, and for the serious practitioner of Mass Spectrometry in all of its many applications, if funds will allow then attendance at the annual ASMS Meeting will be a “must” for many years to come!"