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This Wednesday afternoon session on new research in informatics and metabolomics will be chaired by Xiaoyu Yang of NIST. It will be held in Ballroom 6CF on the upper level from 2:30 to 4:30 am.

This Wednesday afternoon session will present new research into the microbiome. It will be chaired by Trent Northern of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and will be held in Ballroom 20A from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m.

This Tuesday morning session will discuss clinical and field applications of mass spectrometry, such as proteomic genotyping, detection of cancer tumors and metastases, tissue profiling, and therapeutic drug monitoring. It will be chaired by Alan Rockwood of Rockwood Scientific Consulting and will be held in Ballroom 6CF from 8:30 to 10:30 a.m.

Research awards will be presented this afternoon at 4:45 in Hall D, at the ground level, to Michael T. Marty of the University of Arizona and James S. Prell of Oregon State University. Marty received his PhD in 2013 at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The 2018 recipient of the Biemann Medal is Benjamin A. Garcia for his contributions to elucidation of the “histone code,” the set of posttranslational modifications (PTMs) to histone proteins that are thought to regulate gene expression. His lecture will be given at 4:45 pm in Hall D, at the ground level.

This Tuesday afternoon session will discuss mass spectrometry analysis of emerging environmental contaminants found in fish, wastewater effluent, arctic snow, drinking water, and other matrices. It will be chaired by Eunha Hoh of San Diego State University and will be held in Ballroom 6A from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m.

What type of mass spectrometry (MS) instrumentation provides the best specificity during trace quantitative analysis from complex mixtures?

The 2018 recipients of the John B. Fenn Award for a Distinguished Contribution in Mass Spectrometry are Gert Von Helden, Martin F. Jarrold, and David E. Clemmer, for their pioneering contributions to the development of ion mobility spectrometry (IMS).

This Monday morning session will cover a variety of issues in petroleum and biofuel analysis. It will be chaired by Carolyn Hutchinson of Willamette University and will be held in Ballroom 6DE from 8:30 to 10:30 a.m.

This Monday afternoon session will present recent advances in mass spectrometry imaging in plants, animals, and humans. It will be chaired by Shama Mirza of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and will be held in Ballroom 20A from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m.

This second of the two parallel tutorial sessions on Sunday evening includes talks from Gregory Eiden of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and Jack Beauchamp of California Institute of Technology.

The ASMS conference will offer two parallel tutorial sessions on Sunday evening.

Both of these Plenary session talks will take place in Hall D, ground level.

Three one-day short courses will be held on Sunday, June 3, from 9:00 am–4:30 or 5:00 pm. Course registration and badge pick-up is at 8:00 am on Sunday, and lunch and refreshment breaks will be provided.

Is that peak “pure”? How do I know if there might be something hiding under there?

Specialists in food analysis are increasingly interested in taking advantage of methods that harness the power of ultrahigh-pressure liquid chromatography (UHPLC) and high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS). Jon Wong of the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been developing such methods for a variety of types of analysis. In this interview, he talks to LCGC about the work to develop these methods and the advantages of their use.

The 32nd International Symposium on Chromatography (ISC 2018) will be held on 23Ð27 September 2018 in Cannes-Mandelieu, France.

Is that peak “pure”? How do I know if there might be something hiding under there?

The chemical analysis of organic compounds in environmental samples is often targeted on predetermined analytes. A major shortcoming of this approach is that it invariably excludes a vast number of compounds of unknown relevance. Nontargeted chemical fingerprinting analysis addresses this problem by including all compounds that generate a relevant signal from a specific analytical platform and so more information about the samples can be obtained. A DHS−TD−GC−MS method for the fingerprinting analysis of mobile VOCs in soil is described and tested in this article. The analysis parameters, sorbent tube, purge volume, trapping temperature, drying of sorbent tube, and oven temperature were optimized through qualitative and semiquantitative analysis. The DHS−TD–GC−MS fingerprints of soil samples from three sites with spruce, oak, or beech were investigated by pixel-based analysis, a nontargeted data analysis method.

Click the title above to open the LCGC North America June 2018 regular issue in an interactive PDF format.

Click the title above to open the LCGC North America June 2018 regular issue in an interactive PDF format.

This yearly report on new products introduced at Pittcon (or in the preceding year) covers sample preparation instrumentation, supplies, and accessories.

An excerpt from LCGC’s e-learning tutorial on troubleshooting autosampler contamination at CHROMacademy.com

Metabolomics, a word coined in 1998, is the study of small molecules (that is, organic chemicals with a molecular weight of 50–2000 Daltons) present in a given biological fluid, tissue, organ, organism, and environment at a given time. Using the power and high throughput of analytical platforms, such as mass spectrometry (MS) or nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, metabolomics promises to be a cornerstone in innovations and discoveries in the areas of medicine, agriculture, biomedical, space, and environment. Thus, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) graduates and doctorates who interface with analytical chemistry need to prepare for the challenges of academia or industry as metabolomics research takes a centre stage in this big data era.

Peak intensity enhancement is one highly desirable outcome of comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography (GC×GC). When coupled to mass spectrometry (MS), such enhancement is usually achieved with a thermal modulator using a technique called cryogenic zone compression (CZC). Differential flow modulation is a simple and cost-effective alternative to thermal modulation, but the requisite high flow rates are generally perceived as being incompatible with most (electron ionization [EI] and chemical ionization [CI]) mass spectrometers. The past decade has witnessed resurgent interest in coupling GC to atmospheric pressure chemical ionization (APCI), which requires high gas flows to assist ionization. This article reports on the modification of a GC–APCI system with a flow modulator and evaluates its potential to enhance the sensitivity towards selected trace organics.