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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that each year in the United States, 76 million people get sick, 325000 are hospitalized and 5000 die from food-related illnesses. Food-borne illness is a serious public health problem. -National Library for the Environment, Food Safety Issues in the 107th Congress, 2001, Donna U. Vogt.

Conventional pyrolysis can cause defunctionalization of polar structural moieties carrying functional groups, which leads to biased results.

A new combination of analytical chemistry and mathematical data analysis techniques allows the rapid identification of the species, strain and infectious phase of a potential biological terrorism agent. Coxiella burnetii causes the human disease Q fever, which can cause serious illness and even death.

Whether in industrial nations or developing countries, an international harmonized method for drug residue monitoring in animal products is needed.

News All the news from October 2005 Opinion Zosimus questions whether marketing hype has infiltrated into scientific advertisements and taken over from the science. Market Trends & Analysis Glenn Cudiamat provides an overview of the UV/visible spectroscopy market. Comparison of HPLC-Chip/MS with nanoflow LC-MS for proteomic analyses Experts from Agilent Technologies offer a comparison of these two techniques. Country focus This month we take a look at developments within the German and Austrian analytical markets. Q&A Jean-Christophe Mifsud, CEO of Alpha MOS, talks to The Column about the company's range of analytical instruments for organoleptic analysis. Supplies & services

One of the biggest problems facing researchers involved in pharmacogenomics is analysing the recombinant proteins of interest to monitor if they are in a folded state. This article describes a rapid and economical method using asymmetric flow field-flow fractionation combined with multi-angle light scattering (AF4–MALS) to characterize refolded proteins, which overcomes some of the disadvantages associated with other techniques.

This method describes an attempt to identify the source of licit Indian opium based on the fatty acid profile. The analysis was based on gas chromatography (GC) with flame ionization (FID) and mass spectrometric detectors (MS). A total of 124 Indian opium samples were collected and fingerprinted for the presence of various fatty acids. Qualitative analysis of fatty acids indicated the acids such as behenic, stearic and lignoceric were significant biochemical markers, making it a useful method to identify the source of opium for forensic purposes.

The authors take a look at three recently published documents in the validation literature from groups working to (hopefully!) clear up some of the potential for confusion.

In 2004, Waters introduced the ACQUITY UPLC® System. Since this launch, many liquid chromatography (LC) vendors have introduced modified high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) systems designed for ultra-high-pressure liquid chromatography (UHPLC). Although these systems may provide satisfactory performance for analytical-scale compressed chromatography (4.6-mm I.D.), they struggle significantly to provide high-resolution chromatography with sub-2-μm microbore columns (2.1-mm I.D.), which require a system designed to maximize the separation efficiency.

A biomarker is measured as an indicator of normal biological processes, pathogenic processes, or pharmacologic responses to therapeutic intervention. Many times, a putative biomarker is a protein or peptide that is expressed at a relatively low level compared to the surrounding proteome. The constitutive or housekeeping proteins are present in concentrations that are orders of magnitude above the protein of interest, which makes identification and quantitation difficult. In order to validate a candidate biomarker, many samples need to be analyzed to prove that the same analytes are reproducibly identified and are changing in a statistically significant manner due to a perturbation.