Many of you may have already read on our website the news of our bundling of a license of Mnova NMR with the new picoSpin spectrometers (see details here). Why has Mestrelab entered into this agreement and how do we see it?
NMR is a very powerful analytical technique, extremely rich in information and has become, for these reasons, a basic weapon in any chemist’s arsenal. The main reason why it may still not be accessible to many chemists around the World is the high purchase cost of the equipment and its very involved and complicated maintenance and upkeep requirements.

This is where picoSpin come in. This new Colorado (US) company has announced the impending market launch of picoSpin-45, a 45 MHz benchtop spectrometer which will be available to the community at a price of $20,000, suitable for most pockets. We are very excited by this development, as we believe it will make NMR accessible to a huge chemistry community who could only dream about it until now. We could see NMR being used in process control, quality control, in many educational institutions where it has so far not been available (not only undergraduate colleges but maybe even schools soon?) and as a dedicated tool for chemists in product development (wouldn’t it be nice and help productivity to have your own desktop machine to, for example, make sure your reaction is going along the right lines?).

With picoSpin, all of this is possible, and everyone acquiring a picoSpin system will now get a one year license of Mnova NMR included, to allow them to start processing data straight out of the box. And what happens after the one year? Users may want to move to a perpetual license of Mnova NMR if they have other spectrometers, or they could benefit from our plan to release a ‘Mnova for picoSpin’ version, at a significantly reduced price.

I think this is very exciting and cannot wait to see NMR being used by schools, undergraduate colleges and by many companies which may not have been able to use it until today! Good luck picoSpin!

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• Greatly simplify the workflow of the analytical data users they are supporting in their organization
• Significantly improve efficiency in the handling, processing and analysis of analytical data within their organizations.

The fact is that at these conferences we hear the words: ´Could I…´very often, and the answer now is, most of the times, yes. If you are wondering how these Mnova tools could help make your analytical department a more effective place, you can start by taking a look at this graphic below, which I will discuss in more detail in the next post, but which shows how you can take the majority of your analytical data from acquisition to its final goal (be it registration, publication, or any other) with a very streamlined workflow which imposes minimal time and interaction demands on your users.

And this next graphic shows what this would look like from the point of view of the final user, i.e., the chemist, who is looking for optimum results and maximum information from minimum interaction:

And how easy is it to achieve this with the current Mnova? Very! You can even ask us to do the work for you, but more on that on my next post!

Santi Celebrating, Conferences, Mestrelab, Products, Reviews and Publications, support, Uncategorized ASV, Automatic Structure Verification, automation, scripting, SMASH 2010, Spectral DB, workflow tools, workflows No comments Leave a comment

We have just finished the SMASH 2010 conference, and I am keen to post on it as soon as possible. This year, SMASH was held at Portland, OR, in the US. It was an excellent conference, with a varied and very well received program, chaired by Andreas Kaerner and Brian Marquez, which you can check out here.
One very exciting development in the conference was that, for the first time this year, SMASH was organized jointly with CoSMoS (Conference on Small Molecule Science), at the same venue on the same dates, and with joint sessions on the final day (Wednesday 29th). This makes perfect sense, not only for chemists, who regularly use a combination of NMR and LCMS to do their everyday job, but also for us, who have software plugins to handle data from both techniques, and who therefore had the opportunity of getting to 2 different audiences simultaneously. This is a very welcome development and I want to congratulate the organizing committees of both conferences for raising above technique rivalry and pulling this together.
From the Mestrelab point of view, this was an excellent conference, with several exciting things to be highlighted:

1. We had an excellent user meeting, with a total of over 50 attendees.
   

   Chen and Santi with the iPads, about to give them away to the fastest and luckiest at the 'Speed Analytics'

2. We showcased not only a new version of Mnova, 6.2.0, but a newly released product (our Spectral DB, currently on late beta and available to try out if you want to do so, just let us know) and a quickly advancing project which is not yet ready for release or external testing, but which is giving better and better results (our Automatic Structure Verification module, now incorporating NMR and LC/GC/MS)
3. For the first time, we held the new ‘Mestrelab Contest’, in which our users (or any other attendees) got the chance of winning 2 iPads, by completing a workflow in Mnova as fast as possible (one iPad went to the fastest person, another one was drawn amongst all those who took part). The contest was great fun, over 50 people took part, and we had a great time running it, so expect it to feature at future meetings! Andy Phillips (AZ) won the contest, with a time of 3’58” (nobody else got under 5′), and Ana Paula Espindola (UT Southwestern) won the draw. Congratulations to both winners.

Over the next few days, I will blog on these items above, to give you more information and maybe, to set out a contest for those of you who did not come to SMASH, but still want to try your hand at ‘speed analytics’

Santi Conferences, marketing, Trips and business development, Uncategorized conferences, Mestrelab at SMASH, Mestrelab contest, Spectral DB, user meeting No comments Leave a comment

Still on the subject of celebrations after the Spanish World Cup victory, the team at Mestrelab decided to go out to lunch yesterday to eat some of the local octopuses. Don’t worry, we did not eat Paul the Octopus, he is now far too expensive, just some of his distant cousins. Octopus is a staple of the Galician diet, and, following suggestions that after Paul’s predictions we should not eat ‘Pulpo’ in Spain ever again, we did our best and lasted a whole 24 hrs without touching it!

I have to say the wait was worth it, these guys were delicious!

 

 

 

 

Our prediction prior to going to the ‘Pulpería’ (Octopus Restaurant) was that Mestrelab would eat 5 portions of octopus and that the octopus would not eat anything of Mestrelab’s. The prediction came true, proving again that any predictions involving octopusses are amazingly accurate. So, you know what to do, next time you choose your lottery numbers, eat some octopus whilst doing it (or alternatively ask an octopus)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By the way, if you are interested in trying this out, these are 2 ways to do it:

1. Cheap and hard, quite satisfying: Cook it yourself following this recipe

2.  More expensive, very easy and guaranteed satisfaction: visit us at Mestrelab and we will take you out to the Pulperia!!!

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So, here we go!!!! We are all celebrating at Mestrelab, after watching the very exciting, although not too pretty for the purist, World Cup football final!

For years, Spain was taunted as an underachieving nation when it came to football. But in the last 2 years, they have first become the best football team in Europe and now in the World. It is great to see that the footballers are catching up with the software developers and that we will no longer be known only for making the best analytical chemistry software

Congratulations, Spain!!!!!

Santi Uncategorized 2 comments Leave a comment

So, I finally get around to writing about ENC, a couple of weeks late, but this is the sign of the times at Mestrelab, things are just TOO busy. I am writing from Shanghai, so I guess I will update information on this China trip in a couple of weeks, to keep the delay up (Probably from Utah, ASMS).

ENC was a good conference considering the difficulties many people had in getting there. In my case, it was really touch and go. I was sitting in my office in UK on Friday morning and decided just in time (about 10 am) that I was not going to be able to fly from Heathrow to Orlando on Saturday morning as planned. I managed to get on a flight from Madrid to Miami for the following day, and then had to deal with the small matter of getting from Herefordshire to Madrid. I was very lucky. I got an Eurostar ticket 15 minutes before they put up the ‘Sold out’ sign. I then had to get a hire car in Paris, because, what do you know, there was a railway strike in France which made it impossible to go by train to Madrid. With so many Brits trying to get out of UK, there were no hire cars in Paris, but I managed to get one (or rather Cristina managed to find me one) in CDG (this meant having to go the wrong way when I got to Paris, but that was a small problem). So, with all this organized, I drove my car to Heathrow, took the train into London, a taxi to St Pancras and the Eurostar to Paris, a taxi from Paris to CDG, where I collected the hire car, and then drove the car (frustratingly having to go past Paris about 2 hours after arriving at Gare du Nord) to Biarritz, just North of the Spanish border. There I returned the car and took a taxi to San Sebastian airport, just a few kilometers away (car hire companies really need to take a look at One Way fees within the EU, driving the car all the way to Madrid was ridiculously expensive). In San Sebastian (by now 8.00 am on the following day) I took another hire car and drove it to Madrid, where I arrived at the airport 2 hours before my departure time! (the drive in Spain was fairly surreal, surrounded by speeding foreign cars all on their way to Madrid airport, I stopped in a petrol station in Burgos where the attendant, who only spoke Spanish and probably gets 10 local customers on an average Saturday morning, had the shop full with 20 Red Bull craving English, French, Dutch and even Swedish people!). 10 hours flight to Miami, 3 1/2 hours by hire car to Daytona Beach et voilá, after 43 hours, I was in the hotel room, ready for our User Meeting the following day! (Well, I am not sure I was ready for the user meeting, but I was there)

But enough of that, and back to the ENC. I think the conference was a success in very difficult circumstances, and the organizing committee managed to make it all work, using web meeting tools so that presenters from Europe could deliver their talks. The organizers, commanded by Carla Marchioro, really did a fantastic job! (We need to be careful with this, otherwise they may decide doing these things by web meeting in future is good enough, and that really would not do!). The suites felt a bit quieter than normal, and that was a shame, but the atmosphere was still good and for us it was very successful from a business point of view.

Our user meeting was very well attended, 30-40 people, which we were pleased with considering there were other meetings being held simultaneously, many people were still travelling, many did not make it at all and that the Daytona Beach was beckoning outside the window! You can take a look at our presentations here. I was very encouraged by the great interest people were showing in GSD (Global Spectral Deconvolution – take a look at this poster for more info), our new algorithm for fully automatic deconvolution of whole 1D NMR spectra. It is amazing to see how quickly our users are coming up with applications for this algorithm. If you have not tried it yet, I strongly suggest that you do, it is available within the standard Mnova NMR distribution (version 6.1, download a free evaluation here if you don’t have it yet). Stan Sykora’s talk on our (his and Mestrelab’s) efforst in Automatic Structure Verification was also received with great interest (also available on the link above).

We also had a lot of interest on our new Script Market idea, to be launched in the next couple of weeks (more on that on a different post, and announcement duly to come on the Mestrelab web page).

The rest of the week was really busy, full of meetings with customers, other people interested in the software, potential collaborators, etc. The community is really very lively and full of ideas, and we left the conference with many more things to do than when we arrived (just what we needed!)

So, this is all for now. I will try to post some ENC pictures later this week, and give an update on our adventures in China as soon as I can!

Santi Conferences, Uncategorized Automatic Structure Verification, conferences, Daytona ENC, ENC, GSD, Mestrelab User Meeting No comments Leave a comment

I know I still owe you a report on SMASH, and I am really late with that. I hope I can post it before the next edition of the Conference!

But, as sports lovers that we are, first things first! I already wrote about my running exploits on the post about the ACS Fall. Today, it is the turn of 5-a-side football (or indoor soccer I guess over The Pond) and the team sponsored by Mestrelab, who have started strongly in the provincial 2nd Division League (this sounds like a lowly league, but Spain is huge on 5-a-side, and there are actually 5 leagues below it, as well as 3 leagues above it, just in case you care). Anyway, this is of course not the level of sponsorship you may get from companies like Staples or Vodafone, but the team has started the season well, and they are 4th in the League with 7 points after 4 games (2 wins, a draw and a loss). So I figured this is a good time to post, just after an away win, in case form drops. I will update in a few weeks, unless things take a real turn for the worse. Go Mestrelab!

Win a T-shirt

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Soon after ACS (read my post about ACS here), I set off for the IMSC 2009, in Bremen, Germany, were Mestrelab had a booth in what is still a very new market for us, LC/GC/MS.

I have to admit that I was surprised by many things in Bremen:

• The excellent park the city has (more on that later)
• The beautiful historic city (more on that later)
• The excellently organized conference and adjacent exhibition
• The popularity of our booth, with many more visitors than I initially expected.

I will start with the last one. It is clear that the LC/GC/MS market is at a juncture which I think the NMR market has already been at. Too many vendors with too many software data systems for the average user, and a significant interest in a transparent visualization / post processing / analysis tool for LC/GC/MS data. It seems that Analytical Departments are currently split down the middle, with many quite happy to give LCMS or GCMS spectra to their chemists in PDF or even hard copy, and many expecting to give them more, and expecting more from them. For the latter, of course, the Mnova MS plugin could be the ideal tool. Over the next day or two, I will blog more on the arguments for this second approach.

In any case, people from this second group were out in force at IMSC. I had more than 70 visitors to the booth who were looking for Mnova MS demos, and some of them have already purchased the plugin, taking advantage of the very attractive promotions currently available for early adopters of the plugin (you can still benefit from them).

As for IMSC2009, it was attended by circa 2,000 people, and both the exhibition and the conference were excellently organized in an excellent venue, the Bremen Exhibition Centre and Hotel Maritim.

A word about Bremen

Finally, a word about Bremen. I was very pleasantly surprised by this Hanseatic city. It has a very diverse and interesting history, spanning 1,200 years, a beautiful historic old city including 2 World Heritage monuments (the Weser-Renaissance Town Hall and the large and impressive statue of Roland in the Market Square), a wonderfully quaint old quarter called the Schnoor, with improbably narrow streets peppered with incredibly attractive restaurants and bars, a rejuvenated river side excellent for walking, the spectacular Market Square itself and the notorious statue of the Town Musicians, of Grimm Brothers fame. It also has many museums (I did not get to any of them) including what I believe to be a state of the art Science Museum. And, for runners, it has just the most incredible park, the Burgerpark, in the centre of the city, with 200has of park and woodland, an inner lake with beaches, a 7-8 km perimeter just on the park area, perfect for a run before or after the Conference, and many beautiful XIX villas and house in the heart of the park, with amazing views (don’t miss the Park Hotel and the Meierei if you visit). I was even lucky enough to run past a Shakespeare representation on the park on the first afternoon there (in German, I am afraid, I wonder what the Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon would have made of that). The nightlife was also much better than anticipated, and we did put it to the test, but, of course, I really should not blog about that…

Dani Uncategorized No comments Leave a comment

We have had an excellent week at the ASMS Conference, showcasing our soon to be released MS plugin for Mnova. The plugin was very well received by all those attendees who saw it. If you want to see it yourself, just click on this link or on the image below to watch a short introductory video.As I already explained on my previous post, our aim with this plugin is to give synthetic, organic and analytical chemists the opportunity to combine the 2 techniques they most often have to use for analysis and reporting of small molecules into one single software application, with a common philosophy and GUI.

This will mean that anybody working with these data (and potentially even in multivendor situations for both techniques, picture for example a laboratory with Varian, Bruker and JEOL NMRs and Agilent, Thermo and Waters LC/GC/MS) will have to learn only one software application and will be able to combine the reporting of both techniques into a single document.

In addition, the Mnova MS plugin is designed and targeted for the needs of the non-expert user. File opening is totally transparent and parameter free, dataset navigation and display is extremely intuitive and simple, and the software allows a chemist to answer the 4 questions most synthetic / organic / medicinal chemist try to answer by LC/GC/MS:

1. Did I make the compound/s I was trying to make?
2. If I did, how pure are they?
3. Which impurities are present in my resulting compounds?
4. If I did not make the compounds I expected, what did I make?

If you are working with LC/GC/MS and normally try to answer these questions or have to report this kind of information, this plugin is definitely for you.

If you have found this video interesting and you would like to try the plugin, just let us know via the Comments in the blog or by writing to support@mestrec.com.

Santi Products, Uncategorized analytical chemistry, LC/GC/MS, LC/GC/MS analysis, LC/GC/MS processing, LC/GC/MS software, LC/GC/MS visualization, Mnova LC/GC/MS, Mnova MS, MS analysis, MS processing, MS software, MS visualization, multitechnique 3 comments Leave a comment

So, here I am, sitting at my Beijing hotel, late in the evening, ready to fly out to Brazil tomorrow. This visit to China has been a whirlwind, and I have not had time to update the blog, as the opportunity to do so had to compete with, and finally lose to, the chance to get some much needed sleep. The trip has been great, and I have found out a lot of new stuff. I will try to update a couple of times in the next couple of days, with short articles on the time spent at each of the cities I visited.

Shanghai continued to impress me as a truly bustling Asian metropolis, a city of business and commerce. There I met Mr. Hongyu Liu, the General Manager of TLWB (see previous post), who is a very hard working and organized individual with the hunger for success and commitment to achieving it that one can expect from entrepreneurs in recently prosperous economies. Hongyu also happens to be a thoroughly nice and likeable guy, a great host and a very democratic manager to his team of young and smart employees. I expect great things from these guys.

The week started very well, with a visit to the restored Shikumen district of Xin Tian Di (New Heaven), in the heart of Shanghai, the ‘in’ place for eating, drinking and partying in Shanghai, with a mixture of Western and Oriental style establishments, although perhaps with too much of a bias towards the Western. It is also the location of Paul’s, a very stylish French boulangerie and teahouse with excellent coffee and cakes. After a very nice evening there on the first day, we then worked through the Sunday and finished with dinner at Herbal Legend, in Zhangjiang Hi Tech Area, very close to the excellent Parkyard Hotel (Bibo Lu). If you are visiting Shanghai in business, I strongly recommend both. As far as industrial area eateries go, ‘Herbal Legend’ is exceptional, with very good service, life Chinese music most nights and a huge menu of very high quality prepared by Chinese herbal medicine experts, so this is not only good eating, but also good for your health!. On the Monday we visited some companies in the Hi Tech Area, where our software was received with excitement and, on Tuesday, we held a presentation at the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, organized by TLWB and attended by more than 40 scientists from different companies and educational and government institutions. The presentation was a great success and gave us very good traction in the Shanghai area, as well as providing an opportunity for me to try out my incipient Chinese. You will be able to see some photos of the presentation and of some of the attendees by clicking on the photo above or on this link.

After this, it was time to make for the airport ready to fly to Beijing, the next stage of the trip. More on that a little later. But first,a  couple other interesting facts about China and particularly the Chemistry and NMR community there and, like many things in China, it is all about numbers.

It turns out that there are more than 1,000 organizations (public and private) doing NMR within China which, for such a technology and capital intensive technique, is a very impressive number and shows how far these guys have come so quickly.

The second is about the Chinese government approach to CRO, pharma and biotech. We visited AQ Biopharma , a biopharmaceutical start up which is sharing a building with a further 60 start ups. All the facilities are owned by the central government, and rented out to these companies in very advantageous conditions. Each of them gets a lab (different sizes available) and an office. On the ground floor of this 6 storey building (and, by the way, there are several of these buildings in one road, at least 4-5 housing around 60 start ups each) there is a 400 MHz NMR spectrometer and some LC/GC/MS equipment, together with NMR and LC/GC/MS experts, available to all users in that building. I have seen similar set ups in the West (for example, the Nexus facility at Santiago de Compostela University) but the amazing thing here once again is the numbers involved. If there are about 300 of these start ups in one road in one city, what are the chances of some of these succeeding?

All this is fuelled by a ready supply of chemists and biochemists, which are being churned out by Chinese Universities at a rate of knots, as these are still very popular subjects for University hopefuls, unlike in the West, where the scarcity of Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics graduates is posing a problem. And these scientists are very keen on improving their language skills, one of their self-acknowledged challenges. The Pudong Language School is a building of pharaonic proportions which was already open at 6.30 am, when I ran past it. This is not going to stop us from releasing Mnova in Chinese, though. Mnova is already available in Japanese, Russian and Spanish, as well as English, and it is prepared so that it is very easy to ‘localize’ to other languages. If any of you have any other suggestions on possible languages Mnova should support, please use the comments to let us know.

OK, next post, Beijing.

Santi Trips and business development, Uncategorized Mestrelab, mestrelab china, mnova china, shanghai 3 comments Leave a comment