Environmental: Emerging Contaminants
June 5th 2018This Tuesday afternoon session will discuss mass spectrometry analysis of emerging environmental contaminants found in fish, wastewater effluent, arctic snow, drinking water, and other matrices. It will be chaired by Eunha Hoh of San Diego State University and will be held in Ballroom 6A from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m.
The chemical analysis of organic compounds in environmental samples is often targeted on predetermined analytes. A major shortcoming of this approach is that it invariably excludes a vast number of compounds of unknown relevance. Nontargeted chemical fingerprinting analysis addresses this problem by including all compounds that generate a relevant signal from a specific analytical platform and so more information about the samples can be obtained. A DHS−TD−GC−MS method for the fingerprinting analysis of mobile VOCs in soil is described and tested in this article. The analysis parameters, sorbent tube, purge volume, trapping temperature, drying of sorbent tube, and oven temperature were optimized through qualitative and semiquantitative analysis. The DHS−TD–GC−MS fingerprints of soil samples from three sites with spruce, oak, or beech were investigated by pixel-based analysis, a nontargeted data analysis method.
Resources for Careers in Metabolomics for Early Career Researchers
June 1st 2018Metabolomics, a word coined in 1998, is the study of small molecules (that is, organic chemicals with a molecular weight of 50–2000 Daltons) present in a given biological fluid, tissue, organ, organism, and environment at a given time. Using the power and high throughput of analytical platforms, such as mass spectrometry (MS) or nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, metabolomics promises to be a cornerstone in innovations and discoveries in the areas of medicine, agriculture, biomedical, space, and environment. Thus, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) graduates and doctorates who interface with analytical chemistry need to prepare for the challenges of academia or industry as metabolomics research takes a centre stage in this big data era.