ASMS 2023: A Look at the Tuesday Afternoon Oral Session on Plants and Natural Products

From 2:30–4:30 p.m., there was an oral session titled “Plants and Natural Products” which will take place in Room 332. The session, chaired and presided over by Joshua Kellogg of The Pennsylvania State University, included six talks on the role of mass spectrometry in determining metabolites and other compounds occurring in nature.

Kicking off this talk at 2:30 p.m. was Boniek Gontijo of the Federal University of Goiàs in Goiânia, Brazil, who discussed mass spectrometry-based untargeted metabolomics approaches for the comprehensive structural annotation of bioactive metabolites from Anacardium humile, or bushy cashew fruits.

Next at 2:50 p.m., Aleksandra Popowich from The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, New York, USA talked about multi-omics approaches to identifying chia oil in Colonial Mexican art materials.

Following that at 3:10 p.m., Bahar Behsaz of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA illustrated how a pathogen-oriented platform for the large-scale discovery of drug-like natural products discovered a novel antifungal targeting the urgent-threat drug-resistant Candidiasis.

Fourth on the program, at 3:30 p.m., is Kate Nyarko of the University of Missouri-Columbia in Columbia, Missouri, USA, who showed how high performance liquid chromatography coupled to tandem mass spectrometry (HPLC–MS/MS) was able to profile the polyphenol content in honey and its relationship to geographical origins.

After that at 3:50 p.m. was Sarah Williams of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, USA, who talked about single-protoplast and tissue-specific proteomics of agronomic-relevant plant systems using a nanodroplet processing platform.

Wrapping up this session at 4:10 p.m., Benjamin Bartels of M4i, the Maastricht MultiModal Molecular Imaging Institute at Maastricht University in Maastricht, The Netherlands, “[looked] into the small and fragile” – performing highly resolved, matrix-free mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) of the floating fern Azolla and its specialized metabolites.