Liquid Chromatography (LC/HPLC)

The second day at HPLC 2008 will feature sessions like "2D HPLC" with LCGC Advisory Board member Peter Schoenmakers as the chair. The first part of the session, "Fast 2D-LC for Chemical Analysis: the Promises and the Challenges" will also feature an LCGC Advisory Board member, Peter Carr.

HPLC 2008 will surely be an exceptional conference with sessions like, "Applications of Retention Mechanisms" which I will be attending this evening.

Good afternoon, and welcome to LCGC's daily conference report from HPLC 2008, taking place at the Marriott Waterfront Hotel in the scenic Inner Harbor of Baltimore, Maryland. Many of you may recall our coverage of Pittcon 2008 just a couple of months ago, when we brought you all of the breaking developments and cutting edge research that was being introduced and discussed in New Orleans.

LC-MS will be the topic of a short, two-presentation session during Monday's festivities at HPLC 2008 in Baltimore.

Advion Biosciences Inc. (Ithaca, New York), a developer of microfluidic sampling technology for mass spectrometry (MS) has bought almost all assets of its production supplier, Washburn Manufacturing Technologies Inc. (Trumansburg, New York) for an undisclosed amount.

Agilent Technologies has announced the presentation of the 2008 Manfred Donike Award for scientific excellence in sports doping testing to the German research scientist Ulrich Flenker, of the Institute of biochemistry, German Sport University, Cologne, Germany.

GE Healthcare recently announced its completion of the acquisition of Whatman, which is a global supplier of filtration technologies and products.

Merck KGaA (Darmstadt, Germany), a privately-held pharmaceutical and specialist chemicals company, has acquired the assets of chromatographic column developer SeQuant AB (Umea, Sweden). "[The aquisition] offers Merck superb opportunities for the future expansion of the chromatography business," said Klaus Bischoff, head of the Performance and Life Science Chemicals division at Merck.

The assessment of accuracy, which involves the estimation of precision and the determination of trueness, refers to the process of evaluating whether the results provided by analytical methods are close to accepted reference values. The different references available in chromatographic analysis and useful guidelines to perform such a comparison are described.

In this instalment of "Column Watch", columnist Ron Majors examines the role of pressure in high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) from two viewpoints: the impact of the ultrahigh pressures encountered in ultrahigh-pressure liquid chromatography (UHPLC) on chromatographic parameters and increases in column pressure encountered in normal daily use. The latter is of more practical consequence to HPLC users because increased back pressure usually implies that something has gone wrong with the column. Pressure increases as a result of physical and chemical contamination are explored and practical approaches to solve these problems are suggested.

Ion-pair chromatography can be your best friend or your worst enemy.

For this month's discussion, John Dolan shares some of the key resources that he recommends using when you have one of those "How do I?" questions.

PerkinElmer (Waltham, Massachusetts) announced the "Ettre Award" to honor a young scientist in the field of gas chromatography.

This article demystifies the qualification procedures and proposes a well designed, easy and simple set of experiments upon which to establish internal standard operating proceduresfor the complete qualification of HPLC instruments.

Thar Instruments (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) has expanded their European team by four new members since the company's acquisition of Berger SFC in 2007.

This month's installment of "Column Watch" is the second part of a two-part series in which columnist Ron Majors examines the trends and highlights in columns and consumables at Pittcon 2008.

Reducing or, if possible, eliminating the use of organic solvents is an important goal in terms of environmental conservation, human health and the economy.

If the problem source cannot be found or if found, cannot be corrected, an adjustment in flow-rate is justified.

This Tuesday afternoon session, titled "Current Status and Trends in the Application of Liquid Chromatography (LC and UHPLC) Hyphenated with Tandem Mass Spectrometry for Pharmaceutical Analysis" was presided over by Arindam Roy of Covidien.

"A bitter pill to swallow" may be an old adage, but it actually has meaning to today's pharmaceutical industry and to chemists using modern chromatographic techniques.

Being here in New Orleans, which is one of the busiest port cities in the U.S., the topic of Homeland Security seems particularly relevant. So I attended Session 1490, "Homeland Security and Forensic Analysis." It proved to be very interesting.

Pittcon has seen a lot of new products launched this year, all of which innovative in design and concept. A few new products were highlighted in Tuesday morning's session 1173: "New Product Forum: Chromatography Columns," presided over by Robert W. Baudoux from RWB Convention Management.

It seems as though Pittcon 2008 has gone by in the blink of an eye as we reach this, our final day of coverage from New Orleans. And although the long lineup of press conferences may be winding down at this point, the roster of technical sessions continues onward and will even continue into the end of the week.

A professor from the University of Pittsburgh received one of the most distinguished awards at the Pittsburgh Conference on the third day of Pittcon 2008 from New Orleans.

Well, it's Pittcon Day 2, and I followed the suggestion of LCGC Columnist John Hinshaw and attended session 410, "Food Science: UV-Vis, NIR, AA, LC, GC, and Electric Nose."