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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.

The Eighth International Symposium on Advances in Extraction Techniques (ExTech) highlights new extraction technologies for chemical and biochemical analysis in laboratory and on-site settings. Generally, the series focuses on solvent-free sample preparation including methods for rapid and selective enrichment prior to analysis and micro-sample preparation. Major emphasis will be placed on the fundamental understanding of extraction processes that result in greater selectivity and efficiency in method development and a rationalization of method selection for specific applications. On-site environmental methods and biomedical applications will be covered. The ExTech symposium series was initiated in 1999 by Professor Janusz Pawliszyn. The 2006 edition will focus especially on passive sampling methods, use of molecular imprinted polymers, biologically modified sorbents, novel coatings and sorbent material and will take place on 6–8 February at the Moat House Hotel, York.

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.

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.

Since the introduction of the Waters® ACQUITY UPLC® System, many vendors have introduced modified high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) systems designed for fast LC or ultra-high-pressure liquid chromatography (UHPLC). These systems, which can yield satisfactory chromatography at an analytical scale (4.6-mm I.D.), where system volume and system bandspread have less of an impact on peak width, struggle significantly with microbore chromatography (2.1-mm I.D.). These low-volume separations require a system designed to maximize the separation efficiency to provide greater quality information for the user.

During the manufacture of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), the formulation of drug substances, and therapeutic fill and finish, the removal of residues from manufacturing equipment is performed by a series of cleaning procedures. It is imperative that the production equipment be properly cleaned in order to avoid cross-contamination of drug products.1-3 The efficiency of the cleaning procedures must be demonstrated through cleaning validation. This involves demonstrating that residual API, starting material, intermediates, and impurities have been removed from the production equipment.

News All the news from September 2005 Opinion Zosimus provides a controversial look at the trend of selecting monolithic columns and asks if they are all that they are cracked up to be. Benefits of the pretreatment step in purifying water for the LC-MS analyses Two specialists from Millipore provide their discoveries on this subject. Country focus The growing importance of the Chinese analytical science market is the focus this month. Q&A Damian Morrison from Waters speaks to The Column about its BEH technology and how it marks a new milestone in chromatography. Supplies & services