Aspect Analytics at ASMS 2026

The 74th ASMS Conference on Mass Spectrometry and Allied Topics was held in San Diego in early June 2026. On the Aspect Analytics front, Kim Ekroos (Lipidomics Consulting) presented the latest results from our The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research project, while Nico Verbeeck, Director of Mass Spectrometry Imaging, participated in the Mass Spectrometry Imaging (MSI) workshop, and presented a poster on discrete lipid distributions in an animal model of Alzheimer’s Disease.

Quantitative Imaging and Characterization of Brain Ganglioside Phenotypes in Parkinson’s Disease

In the Neuroscience and Neurological Disorders Research oral session, Kim Ekroos presented this international collaboration between Australian (University of Wollongong, University of Sydney), European (Aspect Analytics, Lipidomics Consulting, UCL Human Tissue Biobanks), and US-based (Avanti Research, Merck) partners. This study mapped the distribution of gangliosides across multiple brain regions across samples from a mouse model of Parkinson’s Disease (PD) and human post-mortem tissues. This is not only the first application of spatial ganglioside quantification in human brain tissue but also the largest human study of its kind to date. This study reveals not only species-related differences, but also novel differences between brains from PD brains and healthy samples.

In this Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research funded collaboration project, Weave® is used for the processing and integration of MSI spatial lipidomics data with histology images and annotations from pathologists and the Allen Mouse Brain Atlas, and generation, visualisation and differential analysis of the resultant ganglioside data.

To learn more, read the first results of this study, comparing gangliosides in mouse and human brain, in this preprint on biorxiv.

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Distinct lipid profiles of hippocampal subregions and plaque microenvironments in an Alzheimer’s Disease mouse model revealed by high-spatial resolution MALDI-imaging.

Nico Verbeeck presented this poster where lipids were mapped to hippocampal structures in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s Disease. Weave’s untargeted peak detection pipeline allowed in-depth extraction of MSI signals with ready visual feedback for quality control across disease and control datasets in this multi-animal cohort. The Allen Mouse Brain Atlas integration allows direct comparison of lipid signals in fine-grained spatial regions, both within and across tissues.

This study is a collaboration with the University of Maryland Baltimore, University of Wollongong, and was presented in the “Imaging: Spatially-Resolved Omics II” session.

To view this poster, please go here.

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MS Imaging Workshop

The 2026 ASMS MSI workshop discussed Multiplexing and Multimodal Integration for Deeper Insight. Nico gave a presentation, “Advancing Tissue Biology Research with Spatial Multi-omics” and participated in the panel discussion. He shared some of Aspect's experience with spatial multi-omics integration projects over the years, along with some do's and don'ts. For example, he addressed how wet-lab choices such as spatial resolution and sectioning can affect computational integration, and how Weave handles these challenges.

Want to learn more about how Weave addresses computational integration, the presented studies, or want to discuss how we can support your own spatial multi-omics projects?