Sumaira Ashraf

At the 254th ACS conference in Washington DC

This is a guest post by Sumaira Ashraf.

Last month, I got the opportunity to attend and present my work at the 254th ACS conference held in Washington DC. The session was organized by Raphaël Lévy, Niveen Khashab, and Zhihong Nie. I presented preliminary data regarding my work on multimodal imaging probes for stem cell tracking. I enjoyed the conference but was disappointed by some of the talks. Many speakers  exaggerate their results to impress their audience and hype the worth of their work. I did wonder if it is productive to point out mistakes as no one seems interested in correcting them, but, instead, they might become your lifelong rivals. Here is an example. I know from practical experience that liposomes loaded with small molecule dyes cannot be used as long-term imaging modality because within 24 hrs of loading ~99% signal intensity is lost due to leakage from the liposomal cavity. But speakers presented quantitative imaging data based on these approaches. I wanted to point this problem out but I did not want to get involved in never ending discussion where no one will be ready to admit their errors. Eventually, I did not say anything.

Of course, my own work with polylelectrolyte capsules has some limitations as well: while they are good candidates for protecting imaging probes from intracellular degradation and intracellular species from potentially toxic probes, the limit of detection depends on the amount of contrast agent delivered which still remain low. In my current experiments, I need to overcome this limitation by modifying or choosing an alternate approach.

The Kavli lectures were really very informative… but I could not attend the full talk of the 2nd speaker because the air conditioning was set at a temperature so low that I could not tolerate it: I was forced to leave this interesting lecture. The industry exhibition downstairs the convention centre was massive and fun. I particularly liked the Bruker stall which had good explanation of NMR, mass spectrometers, etc., (covering theoretical and experimental data evaluation). There were other advantages to the visit of the exhibition: chocolates, bags, T- shirts, ice cream (prepared in liquid nitrogen within 3 minutes), lunch, free L’Oréal products, and lucky draw (especially when you win; I won a Swag Bag of merchandise from the ACS Store worth USD$75.00). I was lucky to see the solar eclipse through the cover glasses provided by the conference.

I missed the opportunity to visit the reflecting pool near Lincoln memorial and some interesting museums due to time limitation. I am looking forward to some forthcoming opportunity to see them.

I came back with some thoughts to work with new nanocomposites (recent work presented in one of the talk by Amit Joshi; based on doping materials rather than combining them inside big capsules or attaching via linkers) for multimodal imaging which might have potential to overcome the flaws associated with above mentioned materials. But I need to try… without trying one cannot be sure of anything.