Musings from The Power List: Konstantin Shoykhet

What are your main research aims?
 

I have been involved in (U)HPLC instrument development for over 25 years. My research focuses on the improvement of existing, and the development of new chromatographic methods and instrumentation, and the understanding of complex or unexpected phenomena encountered in chromatography.

What is the most exciting development or emerging trend in liquid chromatography today?
 

One exciting development is two-dimensional (generally speaking, multi-dimensional) chromatography, including both hardware and software tools.

2D-LC has great potential in cutting-edge research, especially for the analyses of complex mixtures such as biological samples. Its strength is the enormous peak capacity, and the great flexibility it offers to resolve selected analytes of interest. It is like attaching a powerful and intelligent zoom lens to your digital camera, you take a wide-angle shot of a landscape, and you can immediately zoom into the areas of the picture where you see the hint of something interesting.

Also with moderately complex samples, 2D-LC can save method development efforts and shorten the way to the analytical result. Instead of tedious method optimization to resolve critical pairs, one can "delegate" these critical pairs to a second dimension. In this way a more robust method becomes available in a shorter time than is the case with conventional 1D-LC. Additionally, due to their unmatched resolution power, the 2D-LC methods tend to be basically more robust and stable than conventional 1D-LC methods. This makes me believe, multidimensional LC will increasingly enter the market for the routine analyses of biomolecules or macromolecules.  

Another area with lots of interesting innovations is "smartness." Historically, due to limited available computational power, the instrument operation was very deterministic and nearly any process change or adjustment needed a human interference. Nowadays, the computational power even in budget chips, along with modern periphery components (electromechanical parts, sensors, MEMS-devices etc.), facilitate comprehensive instrument monitoring and flexible algorithms of intelligent and conditional instrument control. We are seeing the evolution of “smarter” LC instrumentation, and this development will continue, assisting the instrument operators and service engineers. 

How can we ensure that new analytical instruments are accessible and affordable for researchers worldwide?
 

International collaborations and educational programs might be the way to go here. However, availability of new instruments for researchers worldwide is not the primary issue, in my opinion. One important issue is the state of scientific-technical infrastructure in a specific country or geography. It is important that all the factors fit: level of education of the personnel, infrastructure from stable power delivery to availability of reagents, spare parts and services, societal interest on the science and research. All these topics are strongly influenced by the status of education, science and research in the society in specific cultures, countries and geographies. 

What’s missing from the analytical toolbox?
 

While we have versatile instrumentation which can successfully take a sample from the input and produce numbers as an output, there is significant room for improving the data interpretation and validation. For example, intelligent estimation of the quality of a result, and flagging. Also understanding of the entire workflow from sample taking and preparation, through the possible interferences during the analysis itself, to the adequate interpretation of analytical data results in a global context, requires more attention with increasing complexity of the workflows. In particular, the correct data interpretation and classification depends on qualification and interdisciplinary education of the operators.

What is the biggest challenge facing the field right now?
 

There are certain specific challenges in the analytical chemistry or liquid chromatography fields, such as the processing of even smaller sample amounts, processing of very complex (e.g. biological) samples, increasing analytical requirements in environmental analysis, increasing data volume and complexity etc., but I believe the greater challenges are within the field of education.

I agree with Peter Schoenmakers' opinion, published in The Analytical Scientist’s “Ten Year Views: With Peter Schoenmakers," that:

"... education – even in basic chromatography – is a big issue. We are starting to see more mistakes in analytical science because of a lack of education. We need people to understand what they’re doing...  ...This issue has less impact on routine analysis, where we have control procedures, but it is having an important impact on non-routine work, such as problem solving. Moreover, as analytical science is an engine for innovation, we should be able to produce correct data from complex and unknown samples."

This may become a significant obstacle within research, in the future, even despite increased assistance offered by automation, IT-infrastructure and AI.
 

Konstantin Shoykhet is Principal R&D Scientist, Agilent Technologies, Germany