During SMASH 2010 we held the Mestrelab Contest for the first time. Our customers, or any other person willing to participate, had to complete a predefined workflow in Mnova as fast as possible.
The fastest participant won an iPad. A second iPad was drawn between all the participants.
Santi Dominguez and Chen Peng at the Mestrelab stand with the 2 iPads we were going to give away.
A contest?
Yes. We basically designed a typical chemist workflow where users had the opportunity to use the NMR and LC/GC MS plugins as well as our new Spectral DB (currently on late beta and available under request) and our Automatic Structure Verification plugin (not yet ready for release).
How did it work?
We are really happy with how the contest was received, and it seemed that the 50 people who took part in it were also very happy; specially the fastest participant: Andy Phillips (AstraZeneca) who won an iPad, and Ana Paula Espindola (UT Southwestern) who was the winner of the draw between all the participants for the second iPad.
Tell me more!
The workflow the participants had to follow was simple, and it included working up a 1H, 13C and HSQC set of spectra, setting them out for reporting, opening an LCMS dataset and finding potential Elemental Compositions using the molecular formula elucidator tool in our MS plugin, searching our spectral database to match structures and data to that molecular formula and finally, automatically verifying that one of the structures found corresponded to the experimental data. With the very intuitive Mnova GUI, Andy Phillips did all this in less than 4 minutes! Unfortunately, we cannot give you exactly the same steps for you to try your hand at it, as the Spectral DB and the ASV plugins are not published yet, but we have prepared a very simple workflow, similar to theirs, which you can read about and try below!
Oohh… are you guys going to do that again?
Yes! We are looking forward to featuring similar contests at future meetings; so if you want to start practising we have prepared a set of PDF for a very simple workflow, for starters. Let us know how well you do!
Donwload it, start practicing and tell us how long it takes you to complete it.
Learn how to do the workflow in less than 30 seconds
Andy Phillips completed the workflow at SMASH in under 4 min, but Pablo Monje, our Applications Chemist, has done it in 30 secs… using the capabilities for automation afforded by the Mnova scripting feature. To learn more, watch this video and download the instructions
