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Separations Systems Inc. (Gulf Breeze, Florida), a gas chromatography manufacturer, has been given the President's E Award in recognition of exceptional success in exporting their products to other countries.

Dr. Barry L. Karger, the James L. Waters Chair in Analytical Chemistry, Director of the Barnett Institute of Chemical and Biological Analysis at Northeastern University, and internationally recognized expert on separation science, has been elected into the Hungarian Academy of Sciences as an honorary member. Dr. Karger has also been awarded the Csaba Horvath Medal of Innsbuck, Austria, for his contributions to the field of separation science and bioanalytical chemistry.

Varian, Inc. (Palo Alto, California) has acquired the assets and products of Precision Detectors, Inc., a privately owned company based in Bellingham, Massachusetts.

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.

The purge-and-trap (P&T) technique for analysis of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) was pioneered in the 1970s at the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) research laboratory in Cincinnati. Many of the operational parameters developed during this time period are still included in USEPA methods. While these parameters still produce good analytical results, they do not take advantage of advances in instrumentation that enable analysis of emerging contaminants such as fuel oxygenates, and increased sample throughput.

Gas chromatography may be a mature technique, but the need for it in the world of industry has never been greater. With environmental and petroleum-related issues dominating the social and political landscape, expertise in the area of GC-MS is in demand more than ever, making this month?s Tech Forum particularly topical. This month E-Separations Solutions' Technology Forum looks at the topic of GC-MS and the trends and issues surrounding it. Joining us for this discussion are Daniel Pentek of PerkinElmer, Inc. and Hans-Joachim Huebschmann of Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc.

Labtronics has been pleased to announce that a leading food and beverage manufacturer has selected its Nexxis sample tracker to upgrade their existing in-house sample tests and result tracking system.

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.

Q: The current advent of sub-2-?m particles has made ultrahigh-pressure liquid chromatography (UHPLC) available for routine laboratory use. What are the size limitations for particles? How small can they get before the advantages are lost? Would smaller particles require even greater pressures?"

The application of UHPLC-MS for the analysis of schedule 1 drugs of abuse in candied and chocolate matrices Chris Loran and Jason R. Stenzel A small molecule HPLC-chip for the high-sensitivity quantification of pharmaceuticals using triple quadrupole MS. Stephan Buckenmaier, Martin Vollmer, Lukas Trojer and Corinne Emotte Evaluation of extraction methods and bias correction by EPA method 6800 protocol for mercury species in tuna fish tissue using an ion chromatograph coupled to an ICP-MS L.H. Reyes, G.M. Mizanur Rahmun, T. Fahrenholz, L. Tucker and H.M. "Skip" Kingston. Meeting preview 25th Montreux symposium on LC-MS. News All the news for May 2008. Incognito Incognito asks whether continuing professional development should be mandatory for analytical chemists and if so, how could a recognized standard be implemented for assessing basic competencies? Market trends & analysis Glenn Cudiamat provides a report on laboratory gas generators.

Research Group: Dr Sc. Alexander Kurganov and Prof. Dr Sc. Victor Berezkin, Research Laboratory of Chromatography: Institute of Petrochemical Synthesis, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow.

These mini Light Bulb Phone Charms are the perfect accessory for today's mobile phones. Simply put your phone on silent and save the world from hearing your ring tone. Instead, every time you receive a call or text, the mini Light Bulb will flash away.

International Symposium for High Performance TLC

In this article, the authors evaluate the use of multiple mass defect filters on metabolite identification data from a hybrid mass spectrometer. The study also investigates the use of higher energy collisional dissociation for structural elucidation in metabolite identification experiments.

Scientists Jorn Chi Chung Yu, Garrett Lee Burleson, and colleagues in the Department of Forensic Science at Sam Houston State University in Texas have developed a new method for identifying gunshot residue without the presence of lead.

Specific purity requirements are set for water sources, whether we deal with waste, ground, surface, or drinking water. Water quality is key, and it is becoming a focal point for an increasing number of communities worldwide. Water quality determines the use of a body of water such as for manufacturing, farming, fishing, and human consumption. The reason to strive to maintain or improve a given body of water is to preserve or upgrade its quality, because once this quality degrades, so does its value.

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

With electron ionization (EI) used in most gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS) applications, the molecular ion typically is broken apart into multiple fragment ions during the EI process.

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

In drug discovery, determining information about the extent of metabolism and the elucidation of metabolite structures is a vital step for lead optimization and drug scaffold refinement. The identification and characterization of metabolites plays an important role in both the drug discovery and development phases, as unsuitable pharmacokinetics (bioavailability and drug distribution), toxicity, and adverse drug reactions might be linked to metabolic instability. Historically, metabolite identification was carried out after a compound had been chosen for drug development. However, to reduce candidate failures attributed to toxicity effects, many pharmaceutical companies now conduct these experiments in the earliest phases of candidate drug selection.

Detrimental health effects of a group of brominated flame retardants, polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), have been recognized recently, but only after their wide usage and consequently, global dispersal. Of the possible 209 PBDE congeners, 39 (varying in degree of bromination from mono to deca) have been identified previously in the three common technical mixtures. Additional congeners, presumably debromination products of the fully brominated decabromodiphenyl ether (BDE-209), also have been reported in biotic and abiotic environments. However, costly analytical standards are needed to confirm their identification. In addition, the most widely used identification approach, electron ionization (EI) mass spectrometry (MS), primarily produces spectra indicating only homologue grouping (for example, hepta-BDE). Without specific compound identification, full assessment of toxicological consequences of PBDE burdens is impeded. It has been reported previously that electron-capture negative ionization (ECNI),..

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

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

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What are some examples of preparative GC applications? According to R.P.W. Scott in Gas Chromatography (1), ?[t]here are a number of unique problems associated with preparative gas chromatography. Firstly, it is difficult to recycle the mobile phase and thus large volume of gas are necessary. Secondly, the sample must be fully vaporized onto the column to ensure radial distribution of the sample across the column. Thirdly, the materials of interest are eluted largely in a very dilute form from the column and therefore must be extracted or condensed from the gas stream which is also difficult to achieve efficiently.?

On-site sample preparation using MEPS for wastewater analysis Paul Wynne, Roy Hibbert, Dan DiFeo and Peter Dawes. A simple, optimized approach to automated SPE Yanick Bouchard, Shahana Huq and Michael Campognone. Tips & tricks: BEWARE of mismatch Thorsten Hofe, PSS Polymer Standards Service. Seeing green Hian Kee Lee from the National University of Singapore speaks to Alasdair Matheson about his cutting-edge development of an array of simple and "environmentally friendly" sample preparation techniques for environmental analysis. News All the news for April 2008. Incognito Zosimus' successor airs his controversial views on how stale GC has become as a separation technique. Market trends & analysis Glenn Cudiamat provides a report on laboratory spray dryers and comments on the expected market growth in coming years.

It has often been stated (or maybe overstated) that the column is the heart of the chromatograph. Without the proper choice of column and appropriate operating conditions, method development and optimization of the high performance liquid chromatographic (HPLC) separation can be frustrating and unrewarding experiences. Since the beginning of modern liquid chromatography, column technology has been a driving force in moving separations forward. Today, the driving forces for new column configurations and phases are the increased need for high throughput applications, for high sensitivity assays and to characterize complex samples such as peptide digests and natural products.