Episode 69: Droplet Cyclic Ion Mobility Mass Spec: Compressing Months of Enzyme Screening Into Just 14 Hours!

What if you could compress 179 days of grueling laboratory workflow into just 14 hours?In this episode of  @ChromatographyTalk  ,  @Organomation  General Manager David Oliva sits down with analytical chemist Laura Penabad to discuss her groundbreaking new research in biocatalysis and high-throughput screening. Evolving engineered enzymes typically requires checking thousands of variants—a massive bottleneck when traditional Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (LC-MS) runs take minutes per sample. Laura reveals how her team built a modular screening platform that shatters this limitation, running samples 128 times faster than standard methods without sacrificing analytical accuracy.Laura breaks down the "orchestra" of technologies making this possible, including coupling nanoliter droplet microfluidics with Cyclic Ion Mobility-Mass Spectrometry (cIM-MS) to separate complex chemical isomers in milliseconds. She also shares the chaotic but triumphant behind-the-scenes stories of her PhD journey—from presenting a "comically bad" early poster at ASMS to recruiting an undergraduate mechanical engineer to build custom automation software from scratch.If you are an early-career researcher, a mass spec enthusiast, or curious about the future of synthetic biology and machine learning in chemistry, this episode is packed with invaluable intuition and advice.#MassSpectrometry #AnalyticalChemistry #Chromatography #Biocatalysis #DirectedEvolution #IonMobility #PhDJourney #LabAutomation #WomenInSTEM #SyntheticBiology