LCGC North America-08-01-2007

Triclosan is an ubiquitous antibacterial, antimicrobial chemical found in numerous consumer health care products today. This article demonstrates that triclosan can be quantitatively determined in commercial hand soaps using reversed-phase solid-phase disk extraction coupled to quantification using capillary gas chromatography-atomic emission detection while avoiding emulsions.

Eksigent enters Latin America

Ion chromatography (IC) is well suited for the analysis of a variety of inorganic and organic anions and cations. There is an additional dimension to an experiment using the technique as a result of the need to deal with changes in the ionic strength of the solution as the analyte materials are exchanged.

This month's installment of "MS - The Practical Art" provides a slightly different view of how practitioners employ the skills of interpretation that have been the focus in recent columns.

In this installment of "Column Watch" columnist Ron Majors revisits expert predictions from a survey conducted in 1987. A cross section of column experts of the time were asked a series of questions on the future directions in high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) column technology. Now, 20 years later, these predictions are contrasted against current column technology. In many cases, the experts were entirely correct, while in other cases, they were dead wrong. Some current trends were not even considered 20 years ago. The author backs up his analysis with current survey information.

One issue that has become clear to us throughout courses, workshops, seminars, and various talks on the subject of method validation, is that while many people talk the language, sometimes the individual method validation terms mean different things to different people. While the actual protocols, or experimental details used to measure or evaluate method validation can vary, it's a good idea to have a common understanding of the underlying terms. In this month's installment of "Validation Viewpoint," we have compiled glossary of method validation terms as they pertain to chromatography.

Molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) are synthetic polymeric materials that mimic immunosorbents. They are widely used as sorbents for solid-phase extraction (SPE). The most common way to synthesize them is bulk polymerization because of its simplicity and versatility. This produces a hard monolith that has to be ground and sieved to obtain particles in the desired size range. However, the partial loss of the materials as fine dusts; the irregular shape of the particles produced and their wide size distribution, have led to a search for different polymerization methods to offset the drawbacks of the bulk polymerization process.

Faster isn't always better