Welp, it’s day 3 of MAPSS and I’m hungover as hell. That won’t stop me from enjoying Madison, the cool talks, and the new friends I’m making! Come to poster 262 tonight if you want to see how I’m enabling comprehensive metal analysis at the single-worm level. 🪱🪱

Question for current faculty: I’m looking for jobs as I’m in my last year of my PhD. My PI continues to suggest postdoc positions but the market seems tight still. I’ve been offered a postdoc at my current uni in a different department doing totally different research, but my PI hates that idea…1/2

Okay C. elegans people, for this last paper I went through several iterations of 3D-printed tools to enable my research with C. elegans, and I'd like to gauge interest in the community for affordable 3D-printed tools to help with your research. I'll be replying to this post with a survey link!

Kind of weird that I need to start “advertising” myself at upcoming conferences. I’m finishing my 4th year of my PhD and I’d enjoy a postdoc working with C. elegans and/or mass spectrometry but I really need to give it more thought. Especially because my wife is 6mos-1 year behind me in her PhD.

(ABioanChem) Combined metallomics and metabolomics reveal impact of metal homeostasis on biological pathways in C. elegans: Trace metals and metal homeostasis play an essential role in cell metabolism, and an imbalance in this careful balance leads to pathological changes. In… #MassSpecRSS

PREPRINT ALERT 🚨🚨 After 2 years of hard work the first chapter of this work is coming to an end. I hope that this work finds the right audience and provides a new tool to investigate C. elegans metal biology. We plan on following this work up by improving the accuracy of quantitation soon!

Manuscript submitted to Analytical Chemistry. Doubt it will be accepted, but shoot for the moon I guess. Will fall back to Metallomics or Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry if rejected.

Holy shit the final revisions have been made. We’re submitting the LA-ICP-TOF metal imaging paper for C. elegans imaging later this evening. No preprint will be initially submitted. We’ll put out a preprint if we have major revisions from reviewers that take time to address.

I’ve been pretty quiet these past few months because I finally hit my rough patch during my PhD and I think I need to vent in a space where none of the co-authors occupy. I don’t care if they ever find it, most of them are aware of the full situation anyway. 1/X

Isomer-specific distribution of perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) in hepatic zonation in mouse https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.13.682167v1

WORM EMERGENCY!!! Our -80 compressor is failing and we’re not sure what will happen to our worm stocks at the current temp (-45C). They’ve been at this temp for 16 hours and we’re contemplating reviving all strains not currently in use to save them, or move them to a new -80. Anyone have advice??

That’s me! I’ll be highlighting some cool work with @brukercorporation.bsky.social’s Trapped Ion Mobility Spectrometry (TIMS) showing some neat isomer work during the workshop, and iprm-PASEF data at a poster (WP 266) so come see what myself and my lab are up to!

Finally getting good fluorosmurf assay results since I cut my fluorescein percentage from 2.5% -> 1%. 🪱

Weird question and I fully expect to not get a good answer, but when does the conference date for MAPSS usually get announced? My family wants to visit in late June/July and they go to campgrounds during their stays and they want to book early. I don’t want to tell them a date MAPSS might be on. 😅

Any C. elegans fan?

Super excited to see someone else try my method for analyzing PFAS using MALDI-TOF with TIMS! I’ve been having great results behind the scenes imaging sulfonates in mouse tissues and it’s awesome to see plant imaging done as well. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Nothing could have prepared me for how tiny microchannel plates are! Got to replace them in an icpTOF S2 and it was awesome. #teammassspec

#Celegans #Worms - I'm guessing sending whole labs to big conferences might be too expensive for many labs this year. I want to highlight this meeting will be FREE. VAI will cover all costs and lunch and if people still want night networking I will set something up if enough are interested.

Collaborators didn’t like the manuscript. Redoing a million experiments now. Delayed until March. Feels like the last few months of rushing this paper for grants and fellowship deadlines out were for nothing.

This is from my lab! I’m hoping my preprint will be out later this week or Monday! Seems like with grant submissions out of the way we’re finally submitting these papers. 🤣

Taking a break from designing lego mass spectrometers and made my stepdad (an electrical engineer who worked in renewable energy) a solar farm. Needed a mental break from submitting a P41 and editing this manuscript. Thank god both of those are done next week.

Unfortunately I can’t go to #Worm2025. I’ll instead be sticking to my midwest roots and going to MAPSS and a midwest C. elegans conference at Van Andel institutute in Grand Rapids, MI.

Updating 2 more supplemental figures tomorrow morning and finishing the abstract and conclusion before revising for the next week… so close to being done with this paper 🙏

Pairing microscopy images with my mass spec images… whoof this is tedious when I have 80 images of worms. Going to be a long Sunday for me 🤣

I need some #Celegans help part people. I have synchronized populations reaching day 1 gravid adulthood and I see differences in length by up to ~100um. Does C. elegans grow a little more once becoming gravid to reach its ~1mm length or… 1/2

Folks I may have just found the Lego parts to make a moveable C. elegans. Stay tuned for a potential build in the coming few days.

Ordering a new MCP for the Tofwerk S2 and I’m super excited to get the chance to crack it open and install it with a colleague in the coming weeks. Been awhile since and instrument vendor was chill enough to just send us the SOP and install it ourselves instead of bringing someone out to do it.

How hard do bacteria-eating nematodes bite in order to break the bacterial cell wall? Check out our new paper, led by Jason Casar & collab with Jen Dionne, using pressure sensing beads that change color upon compression (bluetorial coming soon) rdcu.be/d5n7v

2/5 main text figures done (currently doing fig 3), 4/6 supplemental figures done… we’re getting close people!

I really want to explore career options beyond the USA after I finish my PhD… Canada, Sweden or Australia/New Zealand sound cool. I’m just sick of life here and want to have a comfortable life with my wife doing research.

I really need to stop publishing around the holidays 🤣

yep. has happened to me.

"You will be visited by three spirits". The three spirits:

Enterobactin carries iron into C. elegans and mammalian intestinal cells by a mechanism independent of divalent metal transporter DMT1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.20.629725v1

Taking a week off for the holidays is going to be nice. I needed a break from pushing through data collection and I need time to make figures. Should have all data collected Jan. 1st which will be a neat way to start the new year. 😃

Interviewer: Can you explain this gap in your resume? Me: I was waiting for the NMR

Parts came in finally! Very happy with the blue pieces I chose. #teammasspec #chemsky

Super secret C. elegans mass spec imaging manuscript submission timeline has shifted slightly. Some authors will be unavailable to review the manuscript until the week or Jan. 6th-10th so we hope to have it submitted/accepted the following week. Once that’s done we’ll upload a preprint!

C. elegans and Mtb! www.etsy.com/shop/Microbe...

tis the season

Failed to make a good looking NGM plate out of legos so it’s back to Zeiss and Leica microscopes for the nematode folks.

Amazing C. elegans cake made by my talented PhD student! #worms

Next model: Bruker D8 Venture Single Crystal XRD (request from friend). Contains simplified Photon CPAD detector and X-ray source with space for a small colored stud of whatever color you want your crystals to be. A reference photo from internet is attached. #Chemsky

The Mendoza lab is hiring a Research Assistant at the University of Colorado Boulder!! Come join our brand new lab as we launch our group! We study zinc homeostasis using a variety of techniques in C. elegans and human models. The view in Boulder ain't bad either! Reach out with questions!

I think I’m going to make some non-mass spec lego stuff for a bit. Maybe a little vivarium and an NGM plate… maybe my Zeiss I use, too? I’ll be back to make other mass spec eventually. Will probably do Something Sciex or Shimadzu.

This has been made, and it came out perfectly. Still waiting on the ICP-TOF parts to come in (you can see the current build behind my hand LOL) #teammassspec #Chemsky

Final product has been made! It’s a lot smaller than I thought it would be but it’s a perfect paper weight for a desk! #teammassspec #Chemsky

Two stages of writing: 1) This shouldn't take too long 2) Oh no