Next week we’ll be heading south to Baltimore, home of the Orioles and Ravens, for two special events: the annual conference of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry and the Pacific Biosciences user group meeting.
The 62nd annual ASMS, to be held June 15-19 at the Baltimore Convention Center, will bring together thousands of mass spectrometry experts. We’ll be at booth #67 in the exhibit hall to show off our proteomic solutions: SageELF for whole-sample fractionation and BluePippin for targeted protein fractionation.
This year’s ASMS promises to be an excellent conference with a great cast of plenary and workshop presentations. We are particularly eager to hear from Vanderbilt’s Richard Caprioli, a MALDI pioneer who will give an award lecture based on his distinguished career in mass spectrometry development. Also of interest: Lucinda Cohen from Merck Research Laboratories will shed light on how mass specs are used in pharmaceutical research, and Erez Lieberman Aiden from Baylor College of Medicine will share insights on folding properties of genomes. Of course, the real meat of ASMS is always the oral sessions and workshops, where scientists exchange the best methods and technology applications. We don’t have enough expertise to fully absorb all the great details in these sessions, but we are looking forward to learning as much as we can!
On Tuesday, June 17th, PacBio will host its East Coast user group meeting at the University of Maryland, an event co-sponsored by Sage. We attended last year and were really impressed with the quality of talks, so we can’t wait to see what’s in store this time. In the past 12 months, more PacBio users have incorporated BluePippin to increase their average read length, so we are especially eager to see how much of a difference this is making. We’ve seen some projects more than double their average read length, a truly amazing feat given how long PacBio reads are to start with.
We hope to see you at ASMS or the PacBio event. If there’s a moment to spare, we might scoot out to enjoy Baltimore’s lovely Inner Harbor. Last year we stumbled upon a great gelato shop there, so if you miss us at our booth you may find us there!