ACS 2009
I start with an apology. I realize the blog has been quiet for a while. This is due to how crazily busy things are with Mestrelab (this is a good thing, I am not complaining) but it makes it hard to keep up with the mailbox and, of course, with the blogs.
So, a couple of weeks ago we spent a few days in Washington DC showcasing our software and giving demos. I want to take the opportunity to thank all those who visited our booth, more than 70 people all together, to get demonstrations of both the NMR and MS plugin.
MS plugin.
The good news is that the MS plugin appears to be well liked by potential users, particularly by organic and medicinal chemists and those supporting them. This probably responds to the software concept, which is very much targeted at the workflow and interest of this specific user profile. Did I make what I planned to make? If I did not, what did I make? So here is what the MS plugin allows you to do easily, implementing a very significant use of automation, and how we see it being used:
- Transparently open data coming from Agilent, Bruker, Thermo and Waters equipment as well as data in mzXML and mzData format (this is our way of supporting formats we don’t have converters for yet, as these are good intermediate formats)
- Read in the TIC on the fly, pick peaks and integrate fully automatically, report this information in tables.
- Display different MS traces by easy mouse interaction, apply background subtraction fully automatically, display TICs for base peaks or for specific Mass ranges and many other visual manipulation features.
- Compute potential elemental compositions for a given molecular ion, based on a set of user defined constraints, and report these findings.
- Match libraries of compounds to LC/MS or GC/MS data, therefore allowing for fast structure verification
This is a very cursory summary and I will follow on my next post with a Powerpoint presentation outlining further detail.
We have, of course, not forgotten NMR. Not at all. Our users were very excited by the possibilities opened by our new deconvolution algorithm, GSD, and also by the Data Analysis and Curve Fitting modules.
ACS Conference
I also represented Mestrelab in the Young Chemists Conference Fun Run. I know, I know. I am not young and I am not a chemist! On the other hand, let me tell you, it was not fun. Well, it was, really, but only after I finished in a very reputable 6th place, it was certainly not fun whilst doing it! If you feel like a laugh, you can check out a photo in C&E News, luckily it was taken at the beginning and not at the end of the race, when things would have looked even much worse!
I was impressed with Washington DC. Particularly, the free museums (great place to take your kids for a few days, as Chen did) and the amazing parks, which join all the main monuments in one single run. This is particularly impressive at night, specially the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial. I also swang by the Pentagon, which is impressive in its size, and spent an evening walking around Georgetown, which is a nice, European-like town with plenty of good restaurants.
More on the MS plugin and IMSC over the next few days, I promise.
