Post Travel Awardee Statements

The SGMS awards on a regular basis travel grants to students for national and international meetings. In this section, the awardees present a small report on their travel.

I was awarded the SGMS Travel Award to present my research at the International Mass Spectrometry Conference (IMSC) 2022 in Maastricht, Netherlands. This conference was a “breath of fresh air” after two years of the COVID pandemic both in terms of scientific discussion as well as networking and making friends. Since the start of my Ph.D. degree in 2019, this was my first opportunity to share my work on “Characterizing Snake Venom Protein Components by Native Spectrometry” in the form of a presentation. It received multiple compliments, was able to promote new instrumentation in the field as well as sparked the conversation about venom research further. Throughout the IMSC 2022, I was able to learn about other areas of study in mass spectrometry which was quite an education for me in the fourth year of my PhD. Last but not least, I have expanded my professional network and with help of others decided to start the Armenian Society of Mass Spectrometry (ArMS2).

With the travel grant support from SGMS, I attended the International Mass Spectrometry Conference 2022, held in Maastricht, the Netherlands. 

The conference provided me a great opportunity to present my work. At the end of my oral session, all speakers were invited for a panel discussion together with the audience, where we talked about the future of compound identification and the application of UVPD fragmentation. 

A wide range of topics was covered in the conference, especially MS imaging and single-cell MS, which interest me the most. Since the M4i in Maastricht is one of the leading MS imaging institute in the world, a lot of bio/clinical related projects with MS imaging technique involved has been presented during the conference. I was amazed by how the development of new MS technology could advance our biological knowledge. Throughout the conference, I have also seen great efforts in instrument development, from both academic and commercial side. 

The 14th European Fourier Transform Mass Spectrometry Workshop held in Lisbon from 11th to 14th July 2022 represented a great possibility for a deep immersion into FTMS-related topics with leading experts from academia and industry.  

For me, it was an opportunity to get acquainted with FT-ICR techniques to their full extent. Presentations and posters covered the whole range of topics starting from instrumentation designs and fundamental studies to cultural heritage investigation and bioanalysis. Some of them demonstrated strong parallels to the studies in our lab and immensely helped to understand certain experimental results, contributing greatly to the ongoing research.     

A rather limited number of participants appeared an additional strong advantage, as fruitful discussions were thus enabled in great detail. I also got a possibility to present a part of my research as a poster about an application of absorption mode FT with full window apodization function in Orbitrap-based metabolomics. Discussion of its content with people from different areas related to high-resolution mass spectrometry was amazing and allowed me to reflect on the data generation step from both engineering and end-user points of view.

I would like to thank the SGMS board for supporting my participation in form of a Student Travel Grant.  The 14th EFTMS workshop was a rich scientific journey, which greatly expanded my knowledge about high-resolution mass spectrometry in general and FT-ICR MS in particular.

Thanks to the SGMS Travel Award I was afforded the opportunity to attend the first course of the International School on Mass Spectrometry organized by Gianluca Giorgi from the Italian Society for Mass Spectrometry.  

The school  primarily focused on the fundamentals of high-resolution mass spectrometry and its applications. The inaugural lecture was presented by Joseph Loo, in which he led us through the history of mass spectrometry focusing on the size of both mass analyzers and analytes. The following introductory lectures were on the fundamental concepts of mass spectrometry, which I particularly enjoyed, as this information is important for designing experiments and easily forgotten when one focuses on their own research field. The next set of lectures provided a detailed overview for the various forms of Fourier transform mass spectrometry with FT-ICR and Orbitraps. During the breaks between these lectures, the analytical performance of these analyzers were debated intensively. The main point of contention was whether an Orbitrap could reach transients which rival those of FT-ICR. 

After the basics were covered the school moved towards the application of high-resolution mass spectrometry. Two personal highlights of mine were the talks on petroleomics and metabolomics. The talk by Ryan Rodgers on analyzing crude oil with FT-ICRs impressed me due to the tricks employed to assign the content of various crudes. The normalization and visualization methods to identify polymers and heteroatom content, even if they seem rather simple, enable a researcher to reach conclusions without the need to assign the thousands of structures contained within the sample. Ljiljana Paša-Tolić delivered a lecture more closely related to my area of research, metabolomics, which spoke to me as she mentioned multiple difficulties that I encountered as well in my research. 

Next to attending the many held lectures, I had the honor to both present my own research on breath analysis with a poster and an oral presentation. I received a lot of feedback on my presented work, especially in terms of instrument settings and how to improve feature detection in metabolomic research. 

All in all, the International School on Mass Spectrometry helped me to refresh my knowledge of the fundamentals, as well as broadened my horizon on various topics. I also enjoyed the rigorous discussions in between, which also led me to question my own research more critically. 

I would like to thank the Swiss Group for Mass Spectrometry again for sponsoring this opportunity for me.

For the second time, since the beginning of my PhD, I could attend to an international mass spectrometry conference (IMSC 2022). I was honored to be selected and had the possibility to give a talk on my research topic “LC-MS/MS with collision induced dissociation (CID) and ultraviolet photodissociation (UVPD) for qualitative and quantitative analysis of low molecular weight compounds”. Photodissociation methods are based on a photon absorption phenomenon and more especially with ultraviolet photons. UVPD is not a new activation method, it has already been used in the past for proteins, lipids, carbohydrates mainly but less for low molecular weight compounds (LMWC). However, LMWC remain important to identify and quantify and especially in complex matrix such as plasma or food. Ultraviolet photodissociation is an alternative fragmentation method to CID because it gives common fragments as well as complementary fragments. We first compared UPVD and CID and then investigate the possibility, advantages and disadvantages of UVPD for qualitative and quantitative purposes. 

To present an oral was challenging but also a good opportunity to exchange and meet other great scientist in the field of mass spectrometry. I could see interesting posters and captivating talks on many topics stimulating novel ideas. 

I would like to thank the Swiss Group of Mass Spectrometry (SGMS) for the support they give me by awarded me with their travel grant for this conference. 

The International Association of Forensic Toxicologists (TIAFT) and its annual conference serves as an international anchor and meeting point for all forensic toxicologists around the globe. Forensic toxicology is, by all means, driven by applied science to tackle acute and exigent problems at the interface of science, medicine and law. Mass spectrometry has long since become the mainstay technique in the repertoire of the forensic toxicologist and advances in mass spectrometry over the past years have been vast and plentiful – and therefore there’s plenty of need to discuss, develop and implement all of that on an international platform.  

This year, the conference took place in Versailles, France, from September 6th to the 8th and was the first in-person conference after a close to three-year hiatus during the pandemic. It was a great opportunity to catch-up and share knowledge and experiences.  

Yannick Wartmann 

The first conference day started off with interesting insights into the topics of performance-enhancing drugs/recreational drugs and behaviour alteration as well as new analytical approaches. Apart from expected topics such as steroid or cannabinoid consumption we also received an input on how LC-MS/MS alongside a specific sample preparation could assist in the long-term detection of bisphosphonate use in race horses. Presentations on new analytical approaches discussed various computational strategies including heavy use of the R statistical language as well as novel sample preparation approaches employing cork or HepG2 cells. 

In the afternoon sessions we were introduced to new alternative specimens. A strong focus of this year’s conference was on phosphatidylethanol to assist in the interpretation of alcohol consumption patterns. Other innovative approaches focused on the use of bladder wash in addition or alternatively to urine as well as the use of hair in metabolomic approaches. In the clinical and forensic toxicology session we heard about intoxications due to contaminated cocaine or the consumption of coconut crabs previously fed on the mango tree cerbera manghas. At the end of this session, I could present my own research, focusing on a new CYP2D6 phenotyping approach using LC-qTOF-MS and metabolomics strategies. 

Michael Scholz 

The second day started with a session of post-mortem toxicology, mainly discussing case reports that have been solved via high-sensitive mass spectrometry analysis of rarely used or low dose toxins. The importance of widespread screening techniques was a focus in the following session, introducing techniques such as PESI-MS and evaluating the potential of high resolution mass spectrometry in quantification of analytes. 

The first afternoon session was then spotlighting metabolomics approaches in forensics. It was stunning to see the dimension of possibilities of these techniques, ranging from equine doping to detection of sleepiness. The latter was the focus of my own presentation which lead to a vivid discussion afterwards. It was the first time for me presenting this topic to the international forensics community and the positive feedback and suggestions were invaluable. The last session of the day was then dealing with plant intoxications which can happen incidentally or accidentally.  Several case report presentations from around the globe introduced rare toxic plants, their biological active compounds and their detection in biological matrices. 

The evening boat ride on the river Seine offered a special networking opportunity passing all the landmarks of Paris.

Tom D Schneider 

The last day focussed on postmortem toxicology and new analytical approaches once again, as well as an afternoon session of free topics. Postmortem toxicology remains one of the most challenging aspects in forensic toxicology. Every single step, from sampling to sample-preparation, to analysis and finally interpretation works differently with samples from the deceased. We discussed screening approaches in postmortem matrices, as well as what is known as postmortem redistribution, how we can interpret blood concentrations of all kinds of substances and even elements after death, and lastly, how metabolomics can be useful in investigating deaths attributed to hypoglycemia.  

Dried blood spots (DBS) got a lot of attention this year too, with new analytical approaches trying to deal with automation and haematocrit normalization as well as screening and quantification methods used with DBS samples. We heard about wastewater analysis and population-wide consumption of psychotropic substances and eventually, I was able to speak about uncovering urine sample adulteration employing an LC-MS based proteomics approach – a talk which was well received. We finished with the free topic session and the entire scientific conference by listening to a tale of poisons and poisonings at the court of the Sun King, almost 350 years ago.  

We would like to firmly thank the SGMS board for their support to bring our work to an international stage at this year's TIAFT annual conference. Merci beaucoup!