LCGC North America-07-01-2008

Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. (San Jose, California), has been presented with two 2008 Frost & Sullivan Best Practices awards for Market Leadership and Competitive Strategy Leadership in Informatics.

This month in "GC Connections," in the first of a two-part series, John Hinshaw relates what happens when high-voltage spikes attack modern electronic equipment, what to do when they occur, and more.

Ronald E. Majors, a senior chemist at Agilent and LCGC's "Column Watch" and "Sample Preperation Perspectives" columnist, received the Chromatographic Society's 2007 Martin Gold Medal at HPLC 2008.

The authors meet the need for a method for the determination of cytosine purity by developing a hydrophilic interaction chromatography (HILIC) method with demonstrated advantages in comparison to other separation techniques.

This month's column will consider two problem areas; peaks that have severely tailing peaks, or split or doubled peaks, and the peaks that front badly.

In continuous flow analysis (CFA), a sample is injected into a flowing carrier solution passing rapidly through small-bore tubing. The sample is mixed with a reagent, which reacts with the sample to develop a color and determine the sample concentration. The use of carefully controlled flow conditions ensures that the color development reaction is reproducible, so that the color measurement need not wait until the reaction has gone to completion.

Guest Editor Peter Schoenmakers provides an introduction to LCxLC, and then goes on to talk about peak capacity, sample dimensionality, phase orthogonality, and some of the successes of the technique and the obstacles yet to be overcome.

Walt Jennings briefly sketches a path, occasionally humorous, occasionally somber, from the time of his Ph.D. candidacy in 1953 to the present day.

RVM Scientific (Santa Barbara,California), a manufacturer of direct heating/cooling systems for laboratory instruments, has been acquired by Agilent Technologies (Palo Alto, California).

The Pittsburgh Conference announced the launch of its 2009 website, www.pittcon.org, containing relevant information for conferees and exhibitors about Pittcon 2009, which will be in Chicago, Illinois, McCormick Place, March 8–13, 2009.