Last week the 17th MassSpec forum took place in Vienna with two days full of exciting mass spec talks.
The conference was open by Prof. Dr. Kevin Pagel who introduced the work of his group that has focussed on revealing the structure of sugar molecules in the gas phase. His group has made great use of ion mobility and action spectroscopy. Prof. Pagel also introduced the focus of the ERC grant he has been awarded lately and is starting in 2020. Our warmest congratulations!
The conference also had a number of talks by students. Armin Guntner from Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Buchberger group presented an idea to predict the blood-brain barrier with the aid of collision crosssections measured with ion mobility. Their exciting research has also been lately published. Yasin El Abiead from Prof. Dr. Gunda Köllensperger group presented the new tool for data preprocessing of LC/HRMS untargeted metabolomics data: mzRAPP. The presentation also won Yasin Al Abiead a young researcher presentation award. Congratulations and we are waiting for the mzRAPP to become available for also other users!
On the second day, I had a great honour to present a bit more fundamental work we have done over the last years about understanding and predicting ionization efficiencies for ESI/HRMS. The talk was greeted with great interest and a lot of questions from measuring pH for water-organic mixtures to matrix effect mechanisms. I hope I sparked also some interest in standard substance-free quantification while showing small pieces of our latest works on quantitative suspect screening of pesticides from food and upcoming work in collaboration with Dr. Brunner from KWR, The Netherlands.
Prof. Martina Marchetti-Deschmann and Gunda Köllensperger, thank you for an awesome organization. MassSpec Forum has made an impression to me as a notable regional conference with high-quality talks, very passionate and engaged scientist, and a great atmosphere. Among other things, the location TUthSky was extraordinary conference venue with fantastic view to Vienna. TU Sky building has been recently renovated with climate neutrality in mind.
