Douglas E. Raynie | Authors

Douglas E. Raynie explores formal and informal training opportunities that may be available to educate all chemists in the fundamentals of necessary laboratory sample preparation skills.

This yearly report on new products introduced since March 2018 covers sample preparation instrumentation, supplies, and accessories.

This yearly report on new products introduced since March 2018 covers sample preparation instrumentation, supplies, and accessories.

Solid-phase microextraction (SPME) was introduced nearly 30 years ago and since that time has matured into a widely used tool in the arsenal of sample preparation techniques. Simultaneously, it has spawned a host of related techniques where sorbent coatings are placed on stir bars, magnetic particles, vial walls, and so on. Over the past few years, several advances in SPME have been developed, including increasing the sorbent surface area available for extraction, accommodating direct analysis by mass spectrometry (MS), and sorbent overcoating to resist fouling by sugars, lipids, and other macromolecules present in some sample types. These advances are discussed in this month’s instalment. The use of SPME for microsampling of biological systems, so-called bio-SPME, will be the focus of Part 2.