Happy New Year everyone! I will not regale you with pictures of collards or peas, or how cold the ocean is this morning, but I do hope this January is better than last year. It’s a low bar but never underestimate the curve balls life can throw. Still, we can control how we deal with them. Good luck!

Hangover cure, how did I miss this?!!! academic.oup.com/alcalc/artic...

Did you wake up wondering how you could make tonight more nerdy, and maybe you hate things dropping* as the clock hits zero? Well this video is for you! youtu.be/kS43BrnzetQ?... * things dropping that I know of: balls, pickles, and flip flops (thats folly beach btw). I bet there’s more.

What were you fluent in when AI hit is key. Those who know things won’t lose that, and not to sound like a Luddite, the future generations seem in trouble if used too much as a crutch. There’s also the current business practice of removing entry jobs to make 5 years profit for collapse in 10 years.

Only 10 years later and my name is still up in the lobby. Considering how many new fancy mass specs they have now at the MUSC Proteomics Center, I wonder if i could just move back in and no one would notice?

Make a bond movie academic North by Northwest: finding out society journals were always better to begin with (Backstory, this is arguably a top 5 bond film by Hitchcock released before Dr. No, the first Bond film.)

PSA for parents (or old “kids”) giving/getting Legos: I didn’t know this till very recently, but if you open a Lego box on one side (I don’t use the finger tabs), the box becomes a self-contained Lego holder/tray. Maybe everyone but me already knew.

#AminoAcidAdvent Day 21: Tyrosine (Tyr; Y) This is the end my friend, tomorrow is the big day. Gird your loins and have lots of merry on hand! tYrosine is the last of the three phosphomusketeers, a fun F derivative. Why 21? Well, U know Y. Source for Dayhoff: biology.arizona.edu/biochemistry...

#AminoAcidAdvent Day 20: Asparagine (Asn; N) You know how sometimes you over do it when nogging your eggnog and you wake up feeling like ass(n), well, that’s the penultimate day of this. It’s like mini glutamine, but also maybe hydrolizes to Asp in aging 🤷‍♂️. FYI was asparagiN according to Dayhoff.

Me and Ben @proteomicsnews.bsky.social are bringing you some holiday science cheer with this week’s #THEProteomicsShow with @lingjun2025.bsky.social. We expect that soon everyone will want to do research they can eat, we do! Find it wherever you find fine podcasts or here anchor.fm/theproteomic...

Doping testing will be for non-human hemoglobin (proteomics hint hint). Funny article btw with "Lance" mice getting M101 injections, an extracellular hemoglobin from the blow lugworm with ridiculous O2 binding capacity. (here is a 2020 paper on the molecule btw: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35536914/ )

#AminoAcidAdvent Day 19: Valine (Val; V) No, this GoT reference will *not* happen. (val's name comes from similarity to an acid from a certain plant, not a rare alloy) We will never forgive you D&D for Seasons 7 and 8!!! In general I find it hard to get excited about branched-chain amino acids.

#HUPO2025 really should’ve had this kid getting by people stoked to visit. youtube.com/shorts/DZnak...

#AminoAcidAdvent Day 18: Aspartic Acid (Asp; D) Apologies to all you Hofmann fans, there’s no fear and loathing in peptides going on here, though Dayhoff’s “asparDic” seems a bit sus. Shorter than its acid brethren, it can still cyclize, which seems biologically important. Google it, I’m on break.

#AminoAcidAdvent Day 17: Alanine (Ala; A) I heard Paul Simon wanted to use Ala instead of Al, but no one got the reference. This tiny aliphatic residue is the Switzerland of amino acids (aka non-reactive), but does have some roles in structure and signaling motifs. 🤷‍♂️

2 days in a row my 10 year old has written really good short stories. Pre 2022 we would instantly be amazed. But in the current world we immediately think she used some LLM. She didn’t btw. But this has also been happening in science for a while and it stinks. The juice is not worth the squeeze.

"We're likely to see sunshine with highs in the lower 70s on Christmas Eve and Day... should be in the top ten warmest (out of over 100 Christmases as far as the 1880s)." @ronbeavis.bsky.social it can be cold or warm... this year we are going legit warm.

#AminoAcidAdvent Day 16: Phenylalanine (Phe; F) If you like it then you should've put a ring on it (i.e., alanine). This essential hydrophobic amino acid is often buried inside protein structures, and is useful to make tyrosine. Dayhoff named F cause P was taken and the obvious phonetics.

Not science: the late great Sharon Jones has the best holiday album ever and I strongly encourage listening. youtu.be/iRENaUQc5No?...

#AminoAcidAdvent Day 15: Glutamic Acid (Glu; E) Don't get too excited about this tasty amino acid! Dayhoff wasn't thinking just about about gluE but also "glutamEke" when naming it. And yes, this terminal residue will cyclize to pyro-Glu with loss of water (like Q), so be warned search algorithms.

#AminoAcidAdvent Day 14: Glutamine (Gln; Q) Maybe one of the funnier Dayhoff naming moments ("Q-tamine"), this amide of glutamic acid will spontaneously cyclize and deamidate when on the N-terminus (not a rare event! Ig beware)... making this new post-doc convinced his SIS peptide was contaminated.

Experience in #archaeological #proteomics? Interested in #Roman economy / organic artefacts? Background in data analysis for #ZooMS? Then apply for a 3-year RA post working to join PELLIS project with the wonderful @gtaylortu.bsky.social to investigate Roman leather economy Apply by 12/01/2026

My fav memory in grad school was coming in early before anyone was in the lab, sitting at my bench planning experiments or making media, with my back to the window as the sun came up over the marsh. Weirdly I work in this building now, though they’ve blocked my old window (and that PI is long gone).

Whoa, I didn’t know DIA was for more than proteomics now. It’s also one of those new agentic AI web browser things no one wants. Wohoo. www.diabrowser.com

I’m friends with one of the guys mentioned (James), but it really is a wild thing that there’s a whole passionate community spending decades trying to find these treasures, and all the hoops they must jump through to even test their ideas. No banging through stone floors as a librarian stamps books.

#AminoAcidAdvent Day 13: Selonocystein (Sec; U) Not one of the classic 20 but U love it! Fenyo and @ronbeavis.bsky.social showed you need to think about its alkylation (Unimod #1008). Pro tip 2: check that the MS1 agrees with Se-78 and Se-80 abundance (it might not). pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/...

A day late for Hanukkah, but we are definitely in the season! Happy holidays to all who celebrate, or maybe just have a nice winter break.

#AminoAcidAdvent Day 12: Lysine (Lys; K) You know it, you love it, the most popular amino acid for tryptic peptide connoisseurs. BUT how often does trypsin really cut after K? Sure Lys-C is on KP duty, but what about cutting sugary Ks in collagenous domains?! More exceptions than I think about.

#AminoAcidAdvent Day 11: Leucine (Leu; L) Isoleucine if it was a Mickey Mouse fan with two methyls at the end, which I guess is important (see Day 10). Beat out lysine for the coveted L. Am I mailing this in by having I and L back to back so I can chill on Sunday… maybe. Don’t judge me!

The excitement I felt seeing an old school lan party was not surprising. I was sad there was no Descent but whatever, also didn’t know about Commander Keen.

“There's growing concern that a technology that's amazing at leveraging the collective intelligence of humanity is paradoxically pulling humans away from collectively coming together to come up with the next big thing.” Numerous additional bad effects are 2-3 years out, if not here already.

#AminoAcidAdvent Day 10: Isoleucine (Ile; I) The branched chain poster child for “small differences lead to big changes”. Move a methyl group in leucine and you’ve got a subtle shift that can change protein structure… but a mass spec can’t tell of course. And using I and l is bad coding practice.

#THEProteomicsShow is back and now we’re talking about #USHUPO2026. Me and Ben @proteomicsnews.bsky.social got to talk to Mike MacCoss @maccoss.bsky.social and it’s everything you’d want: quant, mentoring and car discussions. Find it wherever you find fine podcast or here anchor.fm/theproteomic...

#AminoAcidAdvent Day 9: Glycine (Gly; G) The first amino acid discovered, with the simplest of side groups and flexible, and astrobiologists love it. However, my notes say watch out for G making our life hard (G + G = N; G + A = Q), which seems unlikely, but really confounds when it happens.

#AminoAcidAdvent Day 8: Histidine (His; H) This is the chemist amino acid, fun for his and hers biochemical and chemical reactions, and likely makes your peptide fragment ions 2+. Fortunately it leaves a 110 m/z immonium ion as a clue so you can easily solve MS/MS by hand. You do that still, right?

Improve data quality in bead-enriched plasma proteomics. In our upcoming webinar, Kathrin Korff will show how blood-cell contamination and workflow choices impact depth vs robustness and share practical strategies for better biomarker discovery. Register: www.evosep.com/webinars/web...

This would have fit in our #AltProteomics series, since it is "proteomics".

#AminoAcidAdvent Day 7: Argenine (Arg; R) What's a pirate's favorite amino acid? ARRRgenine! This basic residue is a fav for heavy isotope fans, with a storied history from SILAC to SRM, and of course most famous for trypsin cutting after it giving us the 175 m/z y1 we all know and love.

Did I blindly listen to Orsburn @proteomicsnews.bsky.social on something random... yes. Will this make sense to you in a future episode of the pod... yes again.

#AminoAcidAdvent Day 6: Cysteine (Cys; C) Like Mork & Mindy, these stinky residues love to bond! Jerks like us break these bonds, with chemoproteomics trying to map, probe, and manipulate them. Leftovers stuck to S-S is a fun field but I love them for their antioxidant and metal binding abilities.

I don't know about a lot of things, but I didn't know about thermal proximity coaggregation (TPCA), or maybe I did. Still, dig it. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

#AminoAcidAdvent Day 5: Threonine (Thr; T) This essential amino acid was the last of "the 20" discovered, with no relation to the number 3 (sorry Jack White), but 1 of our 3 phosphomusketeers (TM). Dayhoff gave it the honors of T cause it was more frequent than the other T's... take that Y and W!

#AminoAcidAdvent Day 4: Methionine (Met; M) Arguably the bane of mass spectrometrists, always oxidizing and throwing off your mass. This easily remembered (1 of the 6 unique first letters) stinky essential amino acid is also often overlooked as a common off-target reaction of alkylation reagents. 😱

#AminoAcidAdvent Day 3: Tryptophan (Trp; W) An essential amino acid in foods like turkey, used for notable compounds like serotonin and melatonin. I remember W because it is weird and the backbone looks like a W. But no, it was called W because “tWiptophan (or, contains Double ring)”. Dayhoff!

Top 8% of #TheProteomicsShow podcast listeners, who is ahead of me?! @benneely.com @proteomicsnews.bsky.social

Yesterday, we sent this message to the @viralemergence.org team, bringing a (hopefully temporary) end to our project three years into what started as a decade of planned work. /1

#AminoAcidAdvent Day 2: Serine (Ser; S) Is one of 6 where the first letter is unique, and one of two with hydroxyl side chains... so it is polar. Some people love it as one of the phospho musketeers. I didn't know it was first described in silk protein: babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hv...

#AminoAcidAdvent Day 1: Proline The kinkiest of amino acids (NSFW!), synthesized from glutamic acid, and some even call it the simplest "enzyme". Regardless, its a pro move to include the hydroxyproline variable mod if your abundant proteins have collagen domains... really, do this.

Alright, back from turkey and a few weeks before winter break, can we get a Proteomics Old Time Radio Hour planned, @ucdproteomics.bsky.social and @leannewg.bsky.social? Step 1, platform. Clubhouse still rocking?

Small thread on biotech in Seattle before I head out to Boston: Sentiments in WA life science startup scene = very disappointed in the lack of SBIR renewal to fuel good startup ideas/commercialization efforts, and the number of clinical trials moving from the US to China, Australia, Canada.