Mass Spectrometry Meeting In Denver

The 59th ASMS Conference on Mass Spectrometry & Allied Topics will be held on June 5–9 at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver. The American Society for Mass Spectrometry, which sponsors the annual conference, expects the meeting to attract some 6,500 scientists, more than 330 oral presentations and 2,800 posters, and 170 exhibit booths.

The meeting will open at 5 PM on Sunday, June 5, with tutorial lectures, followed by the opening session and plenary lecture at 6:45 PM, and a welcome reception in the exhibit hall. A series of oral sessions, poster sessions, and workshops will run from Monday through Thursday. The program will conclude at 6:30 PM on Thursday, June 9, after a plenary lecture and reception. Short courses will be offered on June 4 and 5.

All conference information, including registration and housing, is on the meeting website at asms.org. On-site registration for the conference begins at 2 PM on Saturday, June 4, and costs $200 for ASMS members, $350 for nonmembers, $125 for ASMS student members, and $170 for student nonmembers. Registration for a single day is $175. Registration for short courses has already closed.

During the meeting’s opening tutorial lectures, Mark W. Duncan of the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora will discuss “Good Mass Spectrometry & Its Place in Good Science: Sometimes Close Enough Is Really Not Good Enough,” and James W. Jorgenson of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, will present “LC & MS: A Match Made in Heaven.” Ernst K. Zinner of Washington University in St. Louis will give the opening session’s plenary lecture on “Our Stellar Origins Revealed by Stardust Grains.”

Other plenary lectures will be presented by Robert J. Cotter of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, winner of ASMS’s Award for a Distinguished Contribution in Mass Spectrometry, and Béla Paizs of the German Cancer Research Center, winner of the society’s Biemann Medal, which recognizes a significant achievement in basic or applied MS made by an individual early in his or her career. In the closing plenary lecture, Arthur Shapiro of American University will discuss “Why Are We Surprised by Only Some of the Things That We See? Visual Illusions, the Brain & Baseball.”

Oral sessions will be given on numerous topics such as glycoproteins, including new approaches for structure analysis; hydrogen/deuterium exchange for protein structure and function; imaging MS, with presentations on instrumentation and ionization sources, biological applications, and pharmaceutical applications; informatics, including talks on identification, quantification/validation, and tools for pharmaceutical applications of MS; ion traps and hybrid instruments; phosphoproteomics; and metabolomics.

Other oral sessions will cover the fundamentals of subjects including ion spectroscopy, supramolecular chemistry and noncovalent interactions, ion/surface interactions and preparative MS, ion structure and energetics, and ion/molecule and ion/ion interactions.

Short courses will be presented on “Bioinformatics for Protein Identification,” “High-Resolution LC/MS for Structural Identification & Quantitation,” “Interpretation of Mass Spectra,” “Ion Mobility in MS,” “LC/MS Techniques of Electrospray, APCI & APPI: Understanding & Optimizing To Develop Successful LC/MS Methods,” “Practical LC/MS: Fundamentals, Techniques & Applications,” “MALDI Imaging MS: Basic Tools & Techniques,” “MS/MS: An Introduction,” “MS in Drug Discovery & Development: Applications for DMPK Studies,” “MS of Peptides & Proteins,” “Protein Structural Analysis by MS: Hydrogen Exchange & Covalent Labeling,” “Quantitative MS,” “Case Studies in Quantitative Proteomics,” “Metabolomics,” and “Introduction to MS.”

The conference will feature an on-site employment center that offers both online and printed job and résumé listings. Employers can reserve interview booths on-site on a first-come, first-served basis. The employment center will be located in the back corner of the Exhibit Hall and will be open from 7:45 PM on June 5 through 5 PM on June 9.

The next ASMS conference will take place on May 20–24, 2012, in Vancouver, British Columbia.