Henry Ford remarked that coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success. Working together is also more fun. Thus, from the very beginning, we sought to help colleagues adopt and use single-cell proteomic methodologies that our laboratory developed, and to do so following best practices

To develop and disseminate best practices, we included workshops at the single-cell proteomics conference. Starting from the first meeting in 2018, we talked about standards that can help set the field on a solid foundation. These discussions ultimately matured into a set of initial recommendations for performing, benchmarking, and reporting single-cell proteomics experiments:

A milestone for a young field:

Our community recommendations for single-cell proteomics are published OA in @naturemethods: https://t.co/8nPybyuHu1

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— Prof. Nikolai Slavov (@slavov_n) March 2, 2023

We hope that the recommendations can establish our field on solid foundations and avoid simplistic assessment, such as emphasizing a single number (e. g., # detected proteins / single cell) outside of the relevant context:

The number of detected proteins / sample is generally an incomplete and superficial benchmark.
◼️ Better technical benchmarks are the specificity of detection and the quantitative accuracy.

# proteins / single cell is a particularly inadequate benchmark …
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— Prof. Nikolai Slavov (@slavov_n) March 12, 2023

Organizing these recommendation has been fun and productive. Yet, it is only the beginning. We looks forward to continuing our discussions at the single-cell proteomics conference and online at: single-cell.net/guidelines