I had another mandatory Microsoft update thing which 1) enabled their ....sub-performing.... blend of ChatGPT and Bing in the lower right corner of my screen where the button should be to get me back to my desktop... and  2) Makes it so that if I open a document from my desktop and go to save it as a new name it defaults to some imaginary "cloud" thing so I will never ever be able to find it again. You can "other save options" or you can: Open every one of the MS Office things you use  Go to file Go allllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll the way down to Options Go to Save ..read more

  So...front end ion mobility things like TIMS are gas vs electric pull, right? So what happens if you run 5x the flow rate for your LC input? Will that alter the gas pressure enough to change your perception of the collisional cross section (CCS) and thereby change the observed 1/k0 values?  Really really cool study on this here!  You'll note they're using the ESI source, but if you're using the CaptiveSpray you're blasting your solvent directly into your glass capillary, right? I suspect that you'll see something similar when going from 100nL to 2 uL/min!  ..read more

  You know when you finally solve a mystery that is driving you completely bonkers and you get that relief at first that you solved it. But then you realize how many samples you have to go back and rerun and you think "maybe I should really truly quit being a mass spectrometrist"? I'm having one of those days.  Quick solution. If you upgrade your nice TIMSTOF instrument to TIMSControl 5.0 you'll get the thing above that I labeled #1 and - it is AWESOME. You get much better control over your mobilogram windows that can be guided by your real data. Using it right for DDA can give you ..read more

Josip Blonder had one of the biggest effects on my development as a scientist in this field. He's got a fancy emeritus/pseudo-retired status at the NIH now, but apparently he's not just fishing off of Hvar, even if he isn't pulling down the surfaceome these days. He's updated Proteomics for Drug Discovery and it will be out in August! And when I stumbled on this, I also found this one is coming out just before it!  The first book on single cell proteomics by mass spectrometry!  This isn't like preodering a video game. The corporate shmucks can't just cut development and bug testin ..read more

  How cool does that sound? Zoom should be good for a huge number of external participants! You can check it out here if you're interested. https://jhjhm.zoom.us/j/99656763944 ..read more

12 years after leaving a historic Ag university and I'm just almost over my over-exposure to Arabidopsis thaliana (Greek for "scumbag plant" or something).  Whether you hate this plant or not, this is a really really cool new preprint!  Personally, my favorite part of this is TMT LABELING WITH AN OPENTRONS! What a nice cheap option for this step that I wouldn't have thought you could do (the OT-2 pipetted don't do a great job with solvent/positive vapor pressures). So while I don't actually have time to spend on this right now, I'm absolutely going to find out how they did t ..read more

As a lot of people know already my illustrous department voted and decided I'm not good enough to join them on the tenure track.  The first thing I did was give up the shared instrument walkup facility that I managed (and supervised the training of 30+ users) and shut down the university Metabolomics core facility that I inherited. I'm super proud of the validation we did with nearly 600 pure compounds ran and catalogued for RT, exact mass, and fragmentation at 3 different CEs. I'm sure I'll do something with it later, it was too expensive and too much work to not publish it!  This ..read more

  I just prepped and ran an absolute shipload of plasma samples last week using a lot of the best of today's technology. S-Trap 96-well plates so it's fast and reproducible. EvoTips and EvoSep one so they're clean and - again - ultra reproducible and the newest best diaPASEF on a system with all the updates so it's screaming fast on nice little windows.  And......700-ish proteins identified. Which is just about the same f'ing numbers I'd get for plasma in 2011 prepping in a FASP filter and using a terrible old brown Eksigent nanoLC and running samples on an LTQ Orbitrap Velos system ..read more

  I recently had a Windows PC perform an unauthorized system update in the middle of a big batch of files and gave up and bought my first ever MacIntosh/Apple computer. Possibly because I grew up in somewhat extreme poverty and possibly because I don't particularly like the color silver, these things always seemed like they weren't for me. But they are advertised as very very fast.  It's easy to be skeptical, though, because now they are making their own chips. They can use whatever benchmarks they want. The benchmarks I care about are processing proteomics data!  TESTING TIME ..read more

If you've got a spare EvoSep One sitting around not doing anything you could sell it to me for less than a new one costs OR ...you could get a 3D printer and convert it into a ....cheap (??) ... robust and sensitive offline fractionator. The 3D printer converted to a fraction collector is seriously cool.  You can get a shockingly high resolution 3D printer for <$500 these days and you won't need super precise movements to put your tube above the right well in a plate. Steal these plans to build your next fraction collector, for sure!  The...use of an HPLC system that costs the ..read more