April 2015 Issue of The Analytical Scientist

The moment we start taking technology for granted, we risk stifling future innovation and creativity.

Researchers working on Raman spectroscopy based surgical tools sprint towards clinical applications.

When bottles of beer from the 1840s were found on a shipwreck, there was only one thought on the minds of analytical scientists: what chemicals do they contain?

Can surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) help catch vain criminals?

Can wooden toothpicks be the key to improving detection of drugs of abuse using mass spectrometry?

Supercritical fluid chromatography started out as anything but green. The road has been bumpy, but the modern technique cannot be ignored from an environmental perspective – despite its slight identity crisis.

There are a plethora of useful software packages available to analytical scientists for processing experimental data and results. At the top of the list – or pretty darn close to the top – is Microsoft Excel. Why?

The ageless wisdom, “imitation is the sheerest form of flattery,” once again holds true. Unfortunately in quantitative analysis, imitation comes with real consequences.

Consider designing the readout first when developing point-of-need assays.

Ahead of ISCC & GC×GC 2015 symposium, we bring together a posse of multidimensional ranchers for a glimpse of what’s going on in the field – and what to expect at the Texan conference.

The quest for greater separation power, in terms of peak capacity, has inevitably led to the development of multidimensional chromatographic techniques.

My group is working on several new things for GC×GC right now.

Recently, a vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) detector for gas chromatography (GC) was introduced into the market, taking a top five spot in The Analytical Scientist Innovation Awards 2014 in the process.

For most of my industrial career, I’ve been a modeler and have had to deliver practical results.

Comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography (GC×GC) is a step up from standard GC and involves connecting two distinct columns each possessing stationary phases with different selectivities to achieve high resolving power.

Nearly half a century ago, J. Calvin Giddings published a letter that laid out his ideas for a new separation strategy. It resulted in a collection of techniques known as field-flow fractionation (FFF)

Christoph Johann, founder and MD of Wyatt Technology Europe, the company that originally introduced field-flow fractionation (FFF) instrumentation to Europe’s analytical scientists, looks at the history of the technique and shares his involvement with the field.

Way back in the mid-1960s, somewhere in the North American Midwest, J. Calvin Giddings spent a sleepless night in a noisy motel room. Even the room’s rattling air-conditioning unit gave him a hard time.

In 2014, Select-eV took a top spot in The Analytical Scientist Innovation Awards (TASIAs). Here, the technology is teamed up with (GC×GC)-MS in an unusual international environmental monitoring project.

Sitting Down With... Gérard Hopfgartner, Professor in Analytical Sciences and Mass Spectrometry and Head of the Mass Spectrometry Platform of the Sciences Faculty, University of Geneva, Switzerland.

Copolymer analysis can be complex. The 2D approach is the only way to determine molar mass and chemical composition distributions simultaneously.

Even as advances in engineering technologies and manufacturing processes have lowered the cost to make and distribute products, the demand for continued improvement is as strong as ever.

Over 65 esteemed analytical scientists gathered in New Orleans to celebrate the achievements of Peter Seeberger and Andreas Seidel-Morgenstern of the Max-Planck Institutes.

When I was asked to evaluate a brand-new instrument with disruptive potential in my field, I did not spend long thinking about the answer. Here, I share a little background and my first impressions.

For years, thin layer chromatography has been working hard in the background, the choice technique in certain applications. More recently, hyphenation with mass spectrometry has been a relatively quiet – but very real – game-changer. What have you been missing?

In some industries, for example, in early-stage pharmaceutical development, it is desirable to measure particle size from a small samples of dry powders. However measuring small quantities risks measuring a sample that is not representative of the bulk material. In this application note, we demonstrate the capability of the Aero S dry dispersion unit and the Mastersizer 3000 to measure small quantities of pharmaceutical materials dosed with large particles and to detect those large, anomalous particles.