Hot Topics in Gas Chromatography (August 2025)

LCGC International spoke to Damià Barceló, honorary adjunct professor in the Chemistry and Physics Department at the University of Almeria, Spain, about his work analyzing 12 common plastic polymers using Py-GC–MS.

Looking at the fundamental terminology and data analysis principles in benchtop GC–MS

Petroleum contamination from leaking underground storage tanks, for example, is a significant concern for both the environment and human health. Thorough characterization of the contamination is required to form appropriate risk assessments and remediation strategies, but until now, the determination of total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPHs) in soil has typically involved a convoluted and labour-intensive process. In this article, the analysis of TPH in environmental media is simplified using flow-modulated GC×GC–FID with quantitation based on pre-defined compound groupings. This approach overcomes the drawbacks of conventional solvent fractionation approaches, by eliminating the need for sample fractionation and automating data processing workflows.

Switching from helium as a carrier gas is less of a problem than people think. Is it time for you to think about it?

The approach describes a new untargeted, trapped-headspace (THS)-GC-QMS-IMS setup for an exhaustive VOC analysis of complex food, beverage, and flavor products, and allows the classification of mango cultivars in combination with chemometric data evaluation.