Blog overview
You can find a list of all Aspect Analytics blog posts below.
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Spatial omics 4 - Antibody visualization: from microscopy to mass spectrometry
Following on from the last blog, so you're doing immunohistochemistry and want to know how to view it? Here's our overview entry on the different methods involved.
By Alice Ly on September 11, 2022
Read time: 7 minutes
Part of series: Introduction to spatial omics
Recap - ASMS 2022
After a pause of two years, the annual American Society for Mass Spectrometry (ASMS) meeting has come and gone. Now that we’ve recovered from the joy of reconnecting with everyone in person again, here’s a recap of what Aspect Analytics presented at Minneapolis in 2022.
By Alice Ly on June 20, 2022
Read time: 2 minutes
Spatial omics 3 – proteomics with immunolabelling
In this entry, we delve into the OG spatial proteomics technique - immunohistochemistry.
By Alice Ly on April 4, 2022
Read time: 5 minutes
Part of series: Introduction to spatial omics
Spatial omics 2 – Mixing Modern Methods mit Microscopy
Continuing the series of blogs on spatial omics, let's look at how ye olde histology techniques aid and are being integrated into modern omics.
By Alice Ly on February 23, 2022
Read time: 10 minutes
Part of series: Introduction to spatial omics
Spatial omics part 1: the history and how of histology
In this series of blogs, we address different aspects of spatialomics and spatial multi-omics, a rapidly emerging field that looks at molecular markers of cells and tissues in a spatial context. To understand the importance of spatialomics, we have to understand Histology, right at the birth of modern medicine.
By Alice Ly on February 8, 2022
Read time: 6 minutes
Part of series: Introduction to spatial omics
MSI applications part 4: drugs and small molecule metabolites
In this blog post we look at the use of mass spectrometry imaging for investigating small molecules such as drugs and metabolites and then a quick overview of different metabolomic MSI studies and some challenges facing this area but also tools that can help you with your drug metabolite study.
By Alice Ly on January 20, 2022
Read time: 7 minutes
Part of series: Introduction to mass spectrometry imaging
MSI applications part 3: lipids
In this blog post we explore lipid imaging with mass spectrometry, particularly the technical considerations, applications, and limitations.
By Alice Ly on January 12, 2022
Read time: 10 minutes
Part of series: Introduction to mass spectrometry imaging
MSI applications part 2: peptides and proteins
In this blog post we go back to the roots of mass spectrometry imaging, and describe it’s first breakthrough application on biological samples: analyzing the spatial distribution of proteins and peptides in tissue.
By Alice Ly on August 28, 2021
Read time: 10 minutes
Part of series: Introduction to mass spectrometry imaging
MSI applications part 1: glycans
In this blog post we introduce you to the wonderful world of glycans, an interesting analyte for which mass spectrometry imaging is proving to be particularly powerful.
By Alice Ly on July 14, 2021
Read time: 7 minutes
Part of series: Introduction to mass spectrometry imaging
MSI hardware part 2: mass analyzers
In continuation of our quest to elucidate technical terms in mass spectrometry, this post describes the most commonly used mass analyzers in imaging, namely time of flight (TOF), Orbitrap and Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance (FTICR).
By Alice Ly on June 14, 2021
Read time: 6 minutes
Part of series: Introduction to mass spectrometry imaging
MSI hardware part 1: ionization techniques
Are you confused by all the acronyms used in mass spectrometry imaging? In this series of blogs, we hope to provide you with a brief introduction and explanation of some of the different things you might want to know about the technology, starting with the hardware. In this post, we will describe the main ionization techniques and tackle some of those pesky acronyms in the process.
By Alice Ly on May 13, 2021
Read time: 6 minutes
Part of series: Introduction to mass spectrometry imaging
Clojure, I Choose You!
As a software development company, choosing the right tools for the job is of paramount importance. In this post, we will explain why we opted to use Clojure for the full web stack of our platform. When building complex software, leveraging a language that not just supports but actively promotes good engineering practices provides key benefits in terms of efficiency, readability, maintenance and robustness.
By Marc Claesen on April 26, 2021
Read time: 5 minutes
Non-negative matrix factorization in MSI
In this blog post, we continue our overview of unsupervised data analysis approaches commonly used in MSI, diving deeper into factorization methods. This time we will take a closer look at the results of principal component analysis (PCA) in MSI, and compare these to the results of nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF).
By Nico Verbeeck on March 13, 2021
Read time: 5 minutes
Part of series: Unsupervised learning on MSI data
Factorization of MSI data - part 1
In this first series, we will focus on factorization methods. We will show the key concepts of some pervasive approaches and how they translate to MSI data. We will apply all methods to the same data set, to facilitate comparison. In this first post, we will discuss three linear approaches, namely Principal Component Analysis (PCA), PCA + Varimax and Independent Component Analysis (ICA).
By Nico Verbeeck on June 8, 2020
Read time: 11 minutes
Part of series: Unsupervised learning on MSI data
Introduction to mass spectrometry imaging data analysis
Mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) is rapidly being adopted in drug development, biomarker discovery and clinical diagnostics. In this post, we provide a high-level introduction to MSI technology along with the specific challenges and opportunities it brings in terms of data analysis. This post focuses on introducing some nomenclature and describing the main aspects about working with MSI data from a data science perspective.
By Marc Claesen on May 31, 2020
Read time: 7 minutes
Part of series: Mass spectrometry data introduction
Introduction to mass spectrometry data analysis
Mass spectrometry (MS) is an analytical technology that measures the mass-to-charge ratio (m/z) of one or more molecules present within a sample and determines their relative abundance. Mass spectrometry is pervasive within life sciences to detect, identify and quantify compounds within a sample and elucidate the structure or chemical properties of certain molecules. The technology involves ionizing the sample and then stratifying the generated ions based on mass-to-charge ratio to generate a mass spectrum, which is done using a mass spectrometer. In this introductory post, we will briefly discuss how mass spectrometry works and point out some intricacies of MS data.
By Marc Claesen on May 30, 2020