Getting Ready
Conference Program. A detailed program with all presentations listed is now available. Check this out if you are presenting an invited talk, short talk, poster and/or poster highlight talk.
Presenter Guidelines. Check these out if you are presenting an invited talk, short talk, poster and/or poster highlight talk.
Health & Safety - Covid Protocols. Please bring your proof of vaccination and proof of negative Covid test result* to conference name badge pick-up. This will be in the conference room, Merrill Hall. Having these items easily accessible is appreciated. We still plan to ask attendees to be masked in the session room when not eating or drinking. Please read details here.
*This can be a home test, please just take a photo of your test result.
Attire - Weather-Getting Ready. Casual attire is encouraged. The Asilomar Conference Center is a campus, you will be walking from building to building (and to the beach), please wear comfortable shoes. The coastal climate can bring cool breezes and chilly fog. We recommend layers so that you can easily bundle up when the fog rolls in!
Travel to Asilomar. Details for getting to Asilomar by plane or car.
About the Conference
The ongoing single-cell revolution and the rise of single-cell -omics approaches, in particular, single-cell RNA-sequencing highlighted by Science as the Breakthrough of the Year in 2018, have revealed to us the hidden world of cellular heterogeneity, novel cell types, and cell population dynamics. The discoveries enabled by these technologies are transforming our understanding of biology and medicine by decoupling functions, phenotype, and types of individual cells. Most of these single-cell approaches are based on sequencing, flow cytometry, and microscopy, which have a common limitation in that they cannot capture, track, or elucidate the molecular makeup of cells with respect to their proteome, lipidome or metabolome. Single-cell mass spectrometry is emerging as a necessary, valuable, and long-demanded technology to bridge this critical gap.
Until very recently, single-cell mass spectrometry was out of reach due to limitations in sample preparation, separations and MS instrumentation. However, in the past years, several key technological breakthroughs opened the field of single-cell mass spectrometry for much wider development and use. For example, sensitivity improvements in MS instrumentation through gains in ion transmission and utilization efficiency have resulted in zeptomole detection limits that are compatible with in-depth, untargeted single-cell biochemical analysis. In addition, imaging mass spectrometry approaches have reached single-cell resolution, enabling in situ detection of metabolites, lipids, and drugs in single cultured cells as well as single-cell regions in tissue sections.
Presently, there is an exponential growth of single-cell approaches in mass spectrometry, those which use microsampling (such as CE-MS, Live MS, single-probe, nanoPOTS, and fluidic force microscopy) and imaging mass spectrometry (in particular MALDI-based such as microarrays, microMS, co-culture, transmission and post-ionization, as well as other types of imaging mass spectrometry such as SIMS, nanoSIMS, NAPA, LAESI, nanoDESI, atomic force microscopy). Numerous studies have demonstrated the metabolome or lipidome to be characteristic for the cell type, and how it is changed upon perturbations. Overall, by now there is a growing and enthusiastic community of single-cell mass spectrometry method developers and those who are driven by applications of single-cell mass spectrometry biology and medicine. Single-cell mass spectrometry is gaining more recognition at ASMS as well, with a first-ever session devoted to single-cell analysis and with Peter Nemes giving a tutorial talk on this exact topic at ASMS annual conference 2020.
For the 2022 ASMS Asilomar Conference we aim to bring together scientists interested in all aspects of single-cell mass spectrometry, from academia and industry including mass spectrometry vendors, big pharma, and small and medium enterprises developing instrumentation, software, services and applications.