Columns | The LCGC Blog

This time of year tends to serve as a reminder that while women may be entering more degrees and careers in science than ever before, there is still a need to advocate for gender parity in many sectors.

The ability to predict issues and highlight unusual method parameters, before ever entering the laboratory, allows you to be alert for potential issues with a separation, or to change the method (where applicable) prior to initiating any experimentation. These detective skills, when applied in retrospect, are also invaluable for troubleshooting problems with the chromatographic separation or quantitative results.

An undeniable effect of the COVID-19 pandemic is that we have learned how to adapt (quickly) to sudden changes.

If your decision making relies on analytical chemistry, then you want to be confident that the measurements are an accurate representation of the matrix that is being analyzed, and that they are of “publication” quality. But how can you know for sure if the analytical laboratory that you’ve selected is producing reliable data?

In this month’s blog, we provide information about the Subdivision on Chromatography and Separations Chemistry (SCSC) of the Analytical Division of the American Chemical Society (ACS), sharing our main goals and introducing our newly appointed executive board members.

The quadrupole mass analyzing device is now accessible to many analytical chemists as a detector in either HPLC or GC instruments due to their increasingly accessible price point. While it’s not vital that we understand the working principle of these detectors, insight into their design and operation can help enormously when planning or optimizing analyses or troubleshooting issues.

The phenomenon known as the “green rush” outpaces all significant analytical market areas. Given all this excitement, it is worth stepping back to examine the overarching trends and nuances of the cannabis testing environment and offer some opinions about the key players and disruptive technologies gaining traction throughout this burgeoning marketplace.

In this series of blog posts, I’m going to explore how the challenges of adopting methods from the literature, or from internal or external clients, can often be made easier, and more enjoyable, by taking time for some detective work prior to even entering the laboratory.

With modern chromatography modeling software, is it time to hang up our laboratory coats? Is resistance to software solving separations futile?

The deficiency in method validation for forensics laboratories regularly manifests itself in two steps.

Electronic pneumatic controllers (EPC) were introduced into gas chromatography (GC) systems from the mid-1990s onwards and do an excellent job of regulating gas flow and pressure for GC inlets, columns, and detectors. Regular readers will know that, while I support innovation and improvements in engineering capability, I am inherently skeptical of anything with the “black box” tag and believe that unless we inherently understand how something works, we can neither fully harness the potential benefits, nor properly troubleshoot when something goes wrong. Therefore, read on as we open the lid and take a good look inside these particular black boxes.

In 2015, the American Chemical Society’s Committee on Professional Training added a requirement to the ACS degree certification program that undergraduates learn about macromolecules, supramolecular aggregates, and nanomaterials (MSN). This requirement can be met by a specialized course in these topics, but many programs are also choosing the distribute these topics across the curriculum.

I’m very much a “big picture” type of thinker. By that, I mean unless I can understand all of the working parts of a problem and understand how they interact, I find it difficult to decide the best approach to figuring out how to solve the issue.

I do not believe in classic linear separations anymore—further, I think separations science is wildly underdeveloped and under-appreciated.

Separation science is an intriguing and challenging (yes, let’s admit it) interdisciplinary field. Many of our daily rituals depend on effective chemical separations.

I’d like to concentrate on variables that can really impact our chromatography, but may be on hidden, supplementary, or advanced pages of our software, or may appear on the main software acquisitions menus, but are poorly understood or rarely altered. These variables are often not specifically referenced in laboratory methods documents or, if they do appear, are poorly understood.

Over the 17 years since the original Hydrophobic Subtraction Model for HPLC selectivity was published, those who curate the model have collected a huge amount of data as new HPLC stationary phases have been added. Analysis of this new data on almost 600 stationary phases has allowed us to update or adjust several of the stationary phase–analyte interaction terms within the model as well as adding one entirely new term to better describe the dipolar interactions with more modern stationary phases such as the pentafluoro phenyl-type phases.

Is there a secret formula to getting hired into a pharmaceutical analytical chemistry group? What skills are prized above all others?

Many of us have faced the situation where we have analytes that vary widely in their polarity or LogP(D) values and encounter issues with analyte solubility when choosing a suitable sample diluent for our high-pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC) analysis. The more polar analyte will favor aqueous solvents, and the less polar will be more highly soluble in organic solvent—so which do we choose?

Kevin A. Schug suggests that now is the time to fast-track industry–academic partnerships for greater sustainability.

Everyone who is reading this column is interested in chromatography, and I want to shine a light on the industrial side of the application space.

Ron Majors was the 2020 recipient of the Chromatography Forum of the Delaware Valley (CFDV) Award, which is given to those who have provided exceptional service for the Forum in addition to outstanding contributions within the field of chromatography. Readers of LCGC are well aware of his nearly 60 years of research and leadership in this area (1), but few outside the Delaware Valley region know of his decades of membership on the CFDV Executive Committee, including two terms as president. As part of this well-deserved honor, Ron gave a (remote) address to the organization in October 2020, detailing his many accomplishments in the field and summarizing the current state-of-the-art in high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) column technology (2). However, it was his introduction describing the early days of HPLC that stood out to me, specifically a name I had not heard before: Elmar Piel. For this month’s blog post, I invited Ron to join me in writing a bit more about this scientist who may be unfamiliar to many chromatographers.

The question, which is often asked of our technical support and applications chemists, is one to which I often reply, in the words of John F Kennedy, "Ask not what your column can for you, ask what you can do for your column.” OK, JFK substituted “column” for “country” in his version of the quotation, but as you will see, it’s a very relevant premise!

In April 2020, on the heels of the pandemic shutdown, the price of crude oil fell to a negative value for the first time ever. The shutdown hit many oil and gas companies hard. But while companies lick their wounds and decide their next moves, an important concept called environmental and social corporate governance (ESG) has come greater into focus.

Here are 10 great tips for optimizing LC-Electrospray Ionization (ESI)-MS so that you achieve the best possible results every time. These tips and tricks have been collated by my colleagues to form a beginner’s guide to LC-(ESI)MS and as a primer for those who are already using the technique.

The separation science community is full of talented, productive, and innovative researchers of all genders, from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, working around the globe in academia and industry. Our awards should reflect this. It is one thing to say this. It is another thing to do it. But there are steps we can each take to ensure that our awards showcase the full range of separation science talent.

Capillary GC is renowned for being a ”high efficiency” technique, meaning that we typically see very narrow peaks within our chromatograms. This leads to the ability to separate many components in a reasonable amount of time, which is of course analytically advantageous.

Pretty much every commercial chromatography column has some sort of release testing done on it before it leaves the manufacturer. Just how valuable are those tests to the end user? Should column Certificates of Analysis go straight to the rubbish bin?

Oliver Napoleon Hill (1883– 1970) was an American self-help author once described as ”the most famous conman you’ve probably never heard of” (1 ). Conman maybe, but there is a quote of his that I believe to be particularly true when considering sample preparation for chromatography techniques; ”The one who tries to get something for nothing generally winds up getting nothing for something.”

In any given community, on rare occasions, leaders converge on a big idea. The development of such an idea alters the course of the community, in a way that is meaningful if it is lasting. It is my belief that the collective chromatography community is currently converging on a big idea.