[WBrentWilliams]

I'll admit, my perspective is now 16, almost 17 years out-of-date, but my read of this article is that nothing much has advanced beyond what I was doing in the field back then.

My job? Data plumber and analyst, same as now. I scripted the nuts-and-bolts of matching the mass/time/time data off the instrument being developed by much more qualified PhD candidates and their advisor while I finished up my own degree. They did the heavy lifting. I was paid for by F&A funds to do the boring work. Great job for a student.

The job lead to a failed business venture. Water under the bridge. My last foray in data analysis was Principal Component Analysis of the data, trying to cluster detected proteins for visual analysis. I got the plots working outside of Matlab, and then my position was eliminated.

I have a rag-mag credit I could chase down to support my war story. To be honest, I read the article looking for familiar names and faces.

None found.

[throwup238]

I’m pretty sure this article is out of date, or at least the lab they interviewed is. The latest Bruker TOF quadrupole ion trap mass spec is able to sample (tens of?) thousands of ion or m/z datapoints per minute with an optional electrospray ionizer that can handle 100s of kilodaltons so that’s no longer the bottleneck for most proteomics. Actually discriminating charge ratios and data analysis now is.

However I don’t think many academic labs have those mass specs because CROs and pharmaceutical companies have been buying out Bruker’s entire production line and running them almost 24/7 to analyze samples from clinical trials. Since they’re limited in how much blood they can draw per patient, those mass specs significantly expand the number of analytes they can test for and they’re willing to pay serious money for that.

[WBrentWilliams]

As noted above, I was working out of an academic lab developing new equipment. We had current-level commercial equipment at the time to use in comparisons. I matched data to the data dictionary, recovered backups, scripted backups, sent alerts to grad students that their results were done, maintained and expanded the visualization software, consulted and contributed code to a Monte Carlo simulation to demonstrate that data collected was better than random and by how much... Great little projects for a budding software developer. I had to learn just enough Chemistry and Physics beyond what I already knew to be dangerous (and also understand the what and why of what I was doing and be able to ask clarifying questions). It was fun.