ASMS 2024: An Interview with Peter Horvatovich

During ASMS 2024, which will take place June 2–6, 2024 in Anaheim, California, many scientists will present research on the latest advances in mass spectrometry. LCGC International sat down with Peter Horvatovich of the University of Groningen to discuss his presentation, “PASTAQ: threshold avoiding LC-MS(/MS) data pre-processing for untargeted proteomics and metabolomics profiling”. PASTAQ (Pipelines And Systems for Threshold Avoiding Quantification) is a quantitative pre-processing pipeline, which aims to extract all compound related detectable signal from LC-MS/MS data independently from the identification status. The pipeline has been published in Analytical Chemistry in 2021 and the source code of the pipeline is available under MIT license at GitHub.

Horvatovich is a Full Professor in Computational Mass Spectrometry and the Head of Department of Analytical Biochemistry at the University of Groningen in Groningen, Netherlands. His expertise includes topics such as computational mass spectrometry, bioinformatics, proteogenomics data integration, biomarker discovery, trace analysis, mass spectrometry imaging, computational proteomics, and analytical chemistry.

In this interview, Horvatovich answers the following questions:

• Tell us a bit about the work you’ll be presenting at ASMS.
• What sets untargeted proteomics from targeted proteomics?
• What makes LC–MS/MS a useful technique for use in untargeted proteomics and metabolomics profiling?
• What is the PASTAQ pipeline? Can you explain what it is and how it can be used?
• Can you provide examples as to how the PASTAQ pipeline can be used during research studies?
• Were there any unexpected discoveries that were made during this experiment?
• What will you be investigating next in your research?
• What are you most looking forward to at this year’s ASMS conference?