All News

Shimadzu-827232-1408530513185.jpg

Method Scouting Solution

Since the introduction of UHPLC, strategies for fast method development are being discussed. A wide variety of columns with different separation properties is available, offering the user a number of columns suited to a specific application.

AB Sciex (Massachusetts, USA) has announced further expansion of its presence in Singapore, with the opening of a new research and development (R&D) centre. The centre is an addition to the company?s existing $10 million manufacturing operations in Marsiling, Singapore.

PerkinElmer1-827758-1416906556865.jpg

Five employees and one customer of PerkinElmer France teamed up to participate in a 24 h relay bicycle race near Tours (France) in support of cancer research. The September event benefited the ARC Foundation, a major French cancer research organization. Riding a combined 390 km (242 miles), the team won second place in the ?Companies Challenge? portion of the event. PerkinElmer France donated one euro for each kilometre ridden, with proceeds going to the ARC Foundation to help research into cures for cancer.

Biotage-827427-1408530303597.jpg

EVOLUTE® EXPRESS

EVOLUTE? EXPRESS, is a novel family of 96-well plates that simplify polymer-based SPE by employing a streamlined 3-step protocol; Load-Wash-Elute. By using this novel approach and removing the conditioning and equilibration steps, necessary with traditional bio-analytical SPE procedures, processing and method development times are dramatically reduced without loss of analyte recovery or method robustness.

Honeybee Foraging

Diesel exhaust fumes can rapidly degrade the floral odours used by honeybees (Apis melifera) to identify flowering plants, according to results published by scientists at the University of Southampton (Southampton, UK) in the journal Scientific Reports.1

SFC_TC20-828459-1408529155970.jpg

SFC 2013: Meeting Review

A review of the 7th International Symposium on Packed Column SFC (SFC 2013) that was held in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, on 10–12 July 2013.

Potentially dangerous levels of the methamphetamine analogue, N, ??diethyl?phenylethylamine (N, ? -DEPEA), have been detected in a widely available dietary supplement using ultrahigh-pressure liquid chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry (UHPLC–MS). The supplement, Craze, can be bought in the USA and from on-line retailers. The findings have been published in the journal Drug Testing and Analysis by a team of scientists from Harvard Medical School (Massachusetts, USA), NSF International (Missouri, USA), and the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment Health Protection Center (Bilthoven, The Netherlands).1

Engineered nanoparticles released into the environment may affect the growth of agriculturally important crops, according to a new study published in the journal of Environmental Science and Technology.1 Scientists from The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station (Connecticut, USA) investigated the effect of multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) and C60 fullerenes on plant growth. The investigation was part of a larger project funded by the US Department of Agriculture to look at the impact of nanoparticles on agriculture. The team used gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (GC?MS) in this study.

The applications of liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry play a key role in pharmaceutical and biological processing.

i4-829069-1408528768388.jpg

Chiral separation screening has become a widely accepted approach for the rapid identification of an appropriate chiral stationary phase for use in more focused enantioseparation optimization. A set of extended screens encompassing various chromatographic modes using HPLC and SFC is presented.

i4-829066-1408528781450.jpg

Questions about how practical proposed gas chromatography (GC) method changes are often come up during optimization for speed and resolution, or while converting to a different carrier gas. Related objective measurements such as the optimum practical carrier gas velocity were defined more than 40 years ago. This instalment reviews such metrics in the light of their relevance to today's GC challenges.

i8_t-828959-1408528875679.jpg

In any field, there are "misconceptions" or "myths" that arise and are perpetuated and passed on to the next generation. These myths are often driven by a lack of understanding of the real issues by practitioners. In the first of a two-part feature from Ron Majors, the top 10 high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) column myths are presented and attempts are made to demystify them by offering some evidence that they are untrue. This part will feature myths 10 to six.

Peaks of Interest

The Coblentz Society, an affiliate of the Society of Applied Spectroscopy, was approached with a challenge from an anonymous donor during the SciX13 conference.