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The LCGC Awards 2021

This Friday morning session honors the 2021 LCGC award winners: Paul Haddad of the University of Tasmania, and the foundation director of the Australian Centre for Research on Separation Science (ACROSS); and Erik L. Regalado, of the pharmaceutical company Merck & Co.

A UHPLC–MS/MS method is described for rapid quantification of five major bioactive alkaloids in rat urine. The results obtained help lay the foundation for the clinical application and safety evaluation of the bioactive ingredients of menispermi rhizoma, used in herbal medicines.

Ron Majors was the 2020 recipient of the Chromatography Forum of the Delaware Valley (CFDV) Award, which is given to those who have provided exceptional service for the Forum in addition to outstanding contributions within the field of chromatography. Readers of LCGC are well aware of his nearly 60 years of research and leadership in this area (1), but few outside the Delaware Valley region know of his decades of membership on the CFDV Executive Committee, including two terms as president. As part of this well-deserved honor, Ron gave a (remote) address to the organization in October 2020, detailing his many accomplishments in the field and summarizing the current state-of-the-art in high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) column technology (2). However, it was his introduction describing the early days of HPLC that stood out to me, specifically a name I had not heard before: Elmar Piel. For this month’s blog post, I invited Ron to join me in writing a bit more about this scientist who may be unfamiliar to many chromatographers.

Sometimes our approach to troubleshooting specific problems has to change in response to changes in high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) technology over time. In this installment, we discuss changes in technologies for mobile-phase degassing, silica-based stationary phases, and models for reversed-phase selectivity.

Sometimes our approach to troubleshooting specific problems has to change in response to changes in high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) technology over time. In this installment, we discuss changes in technologies for mobile-phase degassing, silica-based stationary phases, and models for reversed-phase selectivity.

As we approach the holiday season, in what has a been the most challenging of years both inside and outside of the laboratory, I wanted to produce a more light-hearted yet inspiring review of 2020 within the Arch Sciences Group laboratories.

Reversed-phase LC–MS has limitations in numerous analytical applications. Alternative MS-compatible chromatographic techniques separate analytes in the liquid phase based on different retention mechanisms compared with reversed-phase LC. This article describes these alternative chromatographic approaches, relevant applications, and the future of these techniques.

Column hardware in liquid chromatography—that is, the tubing, the frits, and fitting—has a strong influence on separation performance or the reproducibility of chromatographic data. Flow distributors and frits can introduce serious band broadening when separation is performed in short, narrow-bore columns. The kinetic performances of packed and monolithic columns are usually similar for well-retained analytes. However, monolithic columns may show significantly better performance for early-eluting compounds, which can be attributed to the moderate mobile phase dispersion caused by the simpler column hardware because no frits are required.