Waters Centers of Innovation Program Honors CSU Laboratory
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At a ceremony at Colorado State University’s Fort Collins, CO campus, Waters Corporation officially welcomed the University’s Proteomics and Metabolomics Facility into its Centers of Innovation Program. Under the direction of Dr. Jessica Prenni, the facility has earned a reputation for excellence in applying non-targeted proteomics and metabolomics using liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry (LC/MS) to advance food and veterinary science and clinical and microbacterial research.
“We take pride and ownership that our discoveries will have a meaningful impact and we recognize the importance of partnerships with corporations like Waters,” said Alan Rudolph, Vice President for Research, Colorado State University. “We’ve seen the impact on science that instrumentation –microfluidics separations, higher resolution, and the ability to look at complex mixtures – can have both here and abroad. We are really excited about our partnership with Waters as a way to fuel new discoveries and allow us to live up to our land grant ethos.”
As part of its academic mission, the Proteomics and Metabolomics Facility develops and validates assays, tools and techniques. In the last year, Dr. Prenni’s team has assisted over 200 principal investigators in 24 departments at six colleges.
“One of the biggest advantages of our partnership with Waters is early access to technology, such as the ionKey/MS system,” said Dr. Prenni. “Using this technology, we developed an assay for one of our clients for five clinically-relevant steroidal compounds which has been applied to a clinical data set of 1,000 serum samples from post-menopausal women. The method showed significant increases in sensitivity, decreases in solvent consumption as compared to traditional assays as well as an ability to separate structural isomers. This project is a great example of how our collaboration with Waters has led to the development of new technologies and allowed us to advance the way we answer important biological questions.”
One industry closely watching the output of Dr. Prenni’s team is the brewing industry. A recent study with their collaborators at the New Belgium Breweryled to a better understanding of the molecular changes that occur in beer during the aging process and has been applied to the development of improved brewing methods that can potentially increase beer stability over a longer time and under a range of storage conditions.
Also on hand to congratulate Dr. Prenni and her team was Eric Fotheringham, Director, Waters Centers of Innovation Program. “Today we applaud the work of Dr. Prenni and her team. Their novel applications for analytical technology are leading to faster scientific progress and we look forward to a long-lasting working relationship.”
Fulfilling its mission requires a variety of state-of-the art instrumentation. The Proteomics and Metabolomics Facility is equipped with a Waters Xevo® G2 QToF, Xevo G2 ToF, and two Xevo TQ-S systems -- all paired with Waters ACQUITY UPLC® systems, an instrument for separating sample components from one another and precisely delivering the analytes one by one into the mass spectrometer where the amounts of each analyte are measured and identified.
In conjunction with the Centers of Innovation Program ceremony, Colorado State University (CSU) and Waters Corporation co-organized a symposium onAdvances in Biological Mass Spectrometry featuring presentations by Dr. Prenni and Dr. Karen Dobos of CSU, Dana Sedin of the New Belgium Breweryand Professor Vladimir Shulaev of the University of North Texas.
