Recently, I had the privilege to return to my home-city of Melbourne, Australia to attend the 2024 International Mass Spectrometry Conference. My session was chaired by Prof Emma Schymanski of the University of Luxembourg, and the keynote speaker was Prof Kevin Thomas of the University of Queensland. Kevin started the session with some brilliant take home messages of the importance of quality control in mass spectrometry, especially in the emerging field of Pyrolysis-GC-MS for the quantification of micro- and nanoplastics in biological matrices. Particularly, the shared MSMS transitions and homologous series shared by polyethylene and naturally occurring alkanes, alkenes and dienes from fatty acids. There was also an excellent talk from Alicia Macan Schönleben of the University of Antwerp on the presence of organophosphorus flame retardants and plasticisers in novel plant based food (vegetarian/vegan meat alternatives).
I was able to present some data from our recent publication, demonstrating the use of MS2Tox and MS2Quant for prioritization of HRMS features from recycled textiles. Click the links to the paper and the presentation below. There was some great questions from the audience about some of the quality control measures that we used to validate this method (thanks to Kevin for bringing that to everyone’s attention).
As the local Australian, I took some colleagues to the Melbourne Cricket Ground to watch a Australian Football League (Aussie Rules) game between Collingwood and Brisbane. It was a close game and had everyone on the edge of their seat. I want to shout out to Dr Bradley Clarke and Prof Mark Green from the University of Melbourne, and Prof Bob Wong and Dr Jake Martin from Monash University for some great discussions and tours of their labs. Finally, I was also able to catch up with some friends and family whilst I was in town. It was really nice to be back in Melbourne for a little while.