Alasdair Matheson

Recent EU legislation on PFAS shifts from monitoring individual compounds toward managing them as a chemical class.

Nicolai Zederkopff explores chromatography’s role to help implement the maximum tolerable level (MTL) framework for food adulteration to translate analytical results into compliance decisions.

Ed Ahearne highlights the benefits of ML-driven chromatography for the development of biopharmaceutical products

Ed Ahearne combined automation, machine learning, and Bayesian optimization to speed up method development for siRNA medicines.

Gert Desmet offers his insights on the potential benefits AI/ML could offer the separation science community in the future.

Quantitative non-targeted screening with predicted response factors is not for regulation, but can rank environmental chemicals by concentration and toxicity.

Gert Desmet explores the current role of AI/ML in separation science.

Multidimensional chromatography cuts ion suppression in complex environmental samples by separating salts and coeluting compounds from target analytes.

Tony Edge explains how SPE optimization improves oligonucleotide LC–MS data.

Perfusion chromatography offers improved separation of oligonucleotide biotherapeutics at ultra-high velocities.

Steven Ray Wilson's AFFL LC–MS system runs thousands of injections per column, but he calls validation and standardization the field's real barrier.

Justin Miller-Schulze and Smith Purdum explain how machine learning and chemometrics can improve fire debris classification in forensic science applications.

As PFAS analysis pushes into trace-level territory, laboratories face a fast-moving mix of vast chemical scope, method fragmentation, and background contamination.

Steven Ray Wilson defines organ-on-a-chip as organoids on microfluidic devices, tracing their small, complex samples to the case for automated online LC–MS.

Lorna Nisbet from the Leverhulme Research Centre for Forensic Science, discusses a GC–MS. technique developed to detect anabolic-androgenic steroids in e-cigarettes seized from Scottish prisons.

Gérard Hopfgartner explains why pairing SFC with dopant-assisted APPI can match, or even beat, electrospray sensitivity, even at microflow LC rates.

Emma Macturk from LECO Corporation explains which forensic applications benefit from GC×GC’s greater peak capacity, and when the additional separation power may only provide limited benefits.

Gérard Hopfgartner explains how atmospheric pressure photoionization can generate radical cations in LC–MS, unlocking EI-style spectra and NIST's spectral library.

A new “one-shot” strategy for preparative chiral supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC) offers fast and effective approach to obtain and characterize individual enantiomers.

SFC delivers measurable cycle-time and solvent-use gains beyond chiral work, spanning biopharma and anti-doping applications, experts say.

Kevin Schug explains how surrogate optimization streamlines SFE–SFC–MS method development, achieving R² values up to 0.97 while boosting sensitivity by 15%

In preparative chiral supercritical fluid chromatography (SFC), adding 2.5–5% water cuts retention times and narrows collection windows, boosting throughput.

Caroline West on supercritical fluid chromatography's advances, pharmaceutical applications, and sustainability.

At ISC 2026, a tailored C4 stationary phase resolved over 30 of 64 possible siRNA diastereomers, aiding characterization of oligonucleotide conjugates.

At ISC 2026, a 20-minute IP-RPLC–UV assay distinguished mRNA capping variants without mass spectrometry, matching a UHPLC–MS reference method.

At ISC 2026, separation science advances included a MEMS gas chromatography column for space missions that raised measured efficiency by up to 74%

At ISC 2026, food and natural matrix research showed shea kernel processing history shapes chemistry more than geographic origin, aiding quality control.

Summary: A preview of 2026 separation science trends, from PFAS and SFC to metabolomics, next-generation HPLC columns, oligonucleotides, and ADC analysis.

Hans-Gerd Janssen explores the industry's shift from fully integrated online systems to at-line approaches.

Gaëlle Spileers from the Separation Science Group in the Department of Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry at Ghent University, Belgium discusses developments in high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC–XRF) for the analysis of brominated flame retardants and other pollutants.