BP4NTA is happy to announce that Dr. Katherine T. Peter is the first ever “BP4NTA Outstanding Service Award” recipient, for her exemplary contributions to the group. Kathy’s innovative ideas, widely utilized products, and unparalleled leadership continue to profoundly impact the BP4NTA working group and the entire NTA community.

The ability of BP4NTA to successfully achieve the group’s goals has always been dependent on voluntary contributions from its members. To formally recognize an outstanding BP4NTA member who has developed ideas for innovative products, led planning and development meetings, produced BP4NTA products of exceptionally high quality and impact, promoted BP4NTA activities and products via internal and external outreach, and conducted all activities while maintaining a respectful, professional, and inclusive environment, Christine and Ruth (as BP4NTA co-chairs) have established the annual “BP4NTA Outstanding Service Award.” We look forward to recognizing other outstanding BP4NTA members in the coming years!

Congratulations Kathy!

The following session will be held at the South East Regional Meeting of ACS in Durham, North Carolina, October 25-28, 2023:

Title: Methods and Applications of High Resolution Mass Spectrometry

Chairs: Elin Ulrich and James McCord

High resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) instrumentation has utility for answering questions in public health, environmental, agricultural, biological ‘omics, medical, regulatory, and other topic areas. Whether small (e.g., metabolites, pollutants) or large (e.g., proteins) molecules are of interest, HRMS can be a useful data collection tool. Applications of HRMS require care to ensure confident and reproducible detection, identification, classification, and quantification of species of interest – whether known or unknown. This session will discuss development and applications of HRMS across topic areas. Topics of interest for this session include (but are not limited to): instrumentation and related advances (e.g., ion mobility, chromatography/online sample prep, detectors); methods development; performance evaluation for HRMS methods (e.g., selectivity, sensitivity, reporting uncertainty); quality assurance; and real-world applications of HRMS.

The following session will be held at the South East Regional Meeting of ACS in Durham, North Carolina, October 25-28, 2023:

Title: Data Analysis Workflows for Non Targeted Analysis Studies

Chairs: Alex Chao, Antony Williams

Description: Increasingly, chemical monitoring and characterization studies are shifting towards high resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) based non-targeted analysis (NTA, also called untargeted analysis or non-targeted screening) approaches which allow discovery of a greater scope of chemicals than traditional targeted methods. By their very nature, NTA approaches generate orders of magnitude greater amounts of chemical feature data; in order to identify the most significant and relevant chemicals present, researchers may perform post-acquisition analyses on NTA data, often via automated methods. These analyses range from retrieving chemical analytical data, metadata, and quantitative structure–activity relationship (QSPR) predictions to support chemical identifications, to performing statistical analyses and/or combining data from parallel studies to support prioritization of chemical features. Topics of interest for this session include (but are not limited to): software analyses, chemical databases, chromatography and spectral predictions, statistical analyses, prioritization of features, machine learning analyses, multi-study data integration (i.e., geospatial, temporal, metabolomics, lipidomics, genomics, transcriptomics, etc.), and applications of approaches on real world NTA data.

We are still BP4NTA but “BP” now stands for “Best Practices” instead of “Benchmarking and Publications”.

The group originally formed to focus on reporting criteria for NTA studies but has since gone far, far beyond that.

To reflect our group’s broad goal to establish and convey best practices for NTA studies using mass spectrometry, we felt the name change was warranted.

BP4NTA members Allison Phillips, Katherine Peter, Jon Sobus, Christine Fisher, Carlos Manzano, Andrew McEachran, Antony Williams, Ann Knolfhoff, and Elin Ulrich team with The Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology (JESEE) to promote Study Reporting Tool (SRT) use by authors, reviewers, and editors of NTA manuscripts in a new publication “Standardizing Non-Targeted Analysis Reporting to Advance Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology”.  

The SRT was explicitly conceived and developed to improve the quality of NTA study reporting. It is a downloadable and fillable template designed to assist authors and reviewers of NTA research manuscripts and proposals.

In addition to providing a framework for thorough and efficient manuscript/proposal preparation and review, the SRT offers editors and decision-makers a clear means to adjudicate assembled reviews.

To ensure transparent use of the SRT during publication, and enable long-term evaluation of SRT adoption/impact, instructions for citation/acknowledgement have been provided for authors and reviewers.

For more information, access the article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-022-00490-1 or visit the SRT page on the BP4NTA website: nontargetedanalysis.org/SRT.

We’re pleased to announce that the registration of the 19th Annual Workshop on Emerging HRMS and LC-MS/MS Applications in Environmental Analysis and Food Safety (September 24^th and 25^th, 2023), in Buffalo, New York, is now open!

The workshop is FREE to attend, but registration is required. Please click here to register.

We invite students, faculty, and researchers to submit abstracts for oral and poster presentations at no-cost and stay for the end-of-the-meeting dinner for an opportunity to form new collaborations with different professionals from around the globe.

Abstract submission is open until July 1^st. Please submit your abstract here.

The purpose of this meeting is to provide a forum for scientists from academia, industry, and government agencies to share and discuss state-of-the-art methodologies and new research findings related to the analysis of environmental and food samples using high resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) and liquid chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) techniques.

We look forward to seeing you on September 24th and 25th, 2023!

Diana S. Aga, Ph.D.
SUNY Distinguished Professor
Henry M. Woodburn Professor of Chemistry
Fellow of the American Chemical Society
Director of UB RENEW Institute

https://www.buffalo.edu/renew/2023-LCMS-Workshop.html

Session: Transformation Products of Emerging Contaminants: What are they, where are they, and how do we find them?

Session chairs: Amanda Brennan, Denise MacMillan, Aero Renyer

Description: The properties of contaminants can transform due to environmental and/or biological interactions and reactions, however the occurrence, fate, and toxicity of transformation products (TPs) are largely unknown. Investigation of TPs from emerging contaminants is critical to better inform environmental and human health risk assessments by filling data gaps. High resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) and non-targeted analysis (NTA) are important tools for the identification of TPs of emerging concern. Despite the growing availability and use of such tools, identification is still a challenge due to 1) the difficulty in predicting transformation pathways for environmentally relevant chemicals, 2) abundance and complexity of data generated with HRMS and NTA techniques, 3) complexity of matrices, 4) chemical variety, and 5) lack of standards. This session will focus on (but is not limited to): identification of novel biological and environmental TPs and pathways; occurrence and effects of TPs; development, advances, and availability of analytical and computational tools (e.g., prediction tools and databases) and workflows for identification; and application to environmental and biological matrices for any class of emerging organic contaminants, including cannabinoid pesticides and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).

Session: Application of High Resolution-Accurate Mass (HR-AM) Methods, Workflows, and Software Tools for Transformation Product Identification

Session chairs: Amanda Brennan and Denise MacMillan

Description:  The properties of contaminants can transform due to environmental and/or biological interactions and reactions; however, the occurrence, fate, and toxicity of transformation products (TPs) are largely unknown.  Investigation of TPs from emerging contaminants is critical to better inform environmental and human health risk assessments by filling data gaps.  Non-targeted analysis (NTA) and HR-AM are important tools for the identification of TPs of emerging concern.  However, identification is still a challenge due to 1) the difficulty in predicting transformation pathways for environmentally relevant chemicals, 2) abundance and complexity of data generated with NTA and HR-AM techniques, 3) complexity of matrices, 4) chemical variety, and 5) lack of standards. 

This platform and poster session will focus on (but is not limited to): identification and occurrence of novel biological and environmental TPs; development, advances, and availability of analytical and computational tools (e.g., predictive tools and/or databases) and workflows for identification; and application to environmental and biological matrices for any class of emerging organic contaminants, including cannabinoid pesticides and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).