The 2nd IMSIS meeting was held in beautiful Münster, a significant city in the history of mass spectrometry.  The meeting was filled with many inspiring talks, interesting posters, and social activities! In addition to our vendor talk, presented by Alice Ly and featuring Christine Bollwein (Institute of Pathology, TU Munich), our contribution to this field was shown by Nico Verbeeck’s oral presentation on our joint project with MD Anderson Cancer Center and The University of Texas at Austin on ovarian cancer, three different posters, and shout-outs from different collaborators in the field. 

Our IMSIS posters were as follows:

 “Weave: A software package for integrated spatial multi-omics visualization and data analysis” 

This poster summarised how our Weave platform addresses the different challenges of bioinformatics for spatial multi-omics data analysis.  As data is typically acquired on serial tissue sections, at different spatial resolutions, in a variety of data formats, this requires expertise across multiple domains to obtain the best results from each individual technology. 

Weave is a cloud-based spatial omics data management and data analysis software platform. We demonstrate the software via two spatial multi-omics use cases:

• Combining lipid MSI (timsTOF fleX, Bruker) with multiplexed sequential immunofluorescence (mIF, COMET, Lunaphore) and histology images of fresh-frozen mouse brain
• The comparison of two antibody-based spatial proteomic assays; MALDI-IHC (Ambergen) and IMC (Standard Biotools) measured on mouse lymph node.

To view this poster, please go here.

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“Integrating Quantitative Mass Spectrometry Imaging with the Allen Mouse Brain Atlas enables Quantification of Brain Region Lipidomes” 

This poster presented by Maria Mantas described a quantitative mass spectrometry imaging (Q-MSI) workflow utilising a multi-lipid class internal standard mixture, our proprietary non-rigid registration pipeline and the Allen Mouse Brain Atlas that enabled comparison of quantitative lipid fingerprints between mouse brain regions. The study demonstrated the feasibility of Q-MSI on over 200 lipid species, expanding MSI’s utility for spatial lipidomics, and revealed subtle changes in lipid distribution compared to standard normalisation methods. Findings were reproducible across MS instrumentations and laboratories. 

To view this poster, please go here.

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“Exploring Cellular Senescence and Aging of the Skin with Spatial Multi-omics”

This collaboration with TU Wien used  a multimodal imaging approach to conduct a spatially-resolved analysis of the human skin N-glycome and age-related changes. Our Weave software platform was used to co-register  MALDI-FTICR MSI measurements for N-Glycans, Visium spatial transcriptomics and histology datasets at full resolution using a non-rigid spline-based algorithm, allowing for simultaneous viewing and integrated analysis of multiple datasets. Correlation analysis identified differences at different omic levels, revealing novel senescence-related changes in the human skin N-glycome.

To view this poster, please go here.

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See you at next year's IMSIS in California!