Sample Preparation

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.

Hian Kee Lee speaks with Alasdair Matheson about "environmentally friendly" sample preparation techniques.

To obtain a better understanding of the challenges faced during method development and validation, the authors - in cooperation with LCGC - conducted a survey earlier this year. This column summarizes the results.

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

The authors discuss a preparative process using the principles of countercurrent chromatography. This process is faster, capable of loadings from milligrams to hundreds of grams, and uses robust equipment.

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

A simple and inexpensive sample preparation method followed by reversed-phase high performance liquid chromatography (RP-HPLC) was developed to quantify oxytetracycline (OTC), chlortetracycline (CTC), and tetracycline (TC) residues in prawns. The total analytical time, including sample preparation, was 15 min for each sample and no organic solvents were used in the sample preparation or chromatography stages.

Sample diluent ionic strength, pH, organic solvent composition and viscosity can all have a significant impact on the performance of CE separation. It is, therefore, essential that the choice of solvent is optimized during method development. The optimized diluent should be fully specified in the method and used consistently in method validation and all subsequent applications of the method.

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."

Monday's "General Interest: LC/GC" session delved into a wide array of new techniques and discoveries in the scientific and academic LC/GC communities.

The 2008 Chromatography Forum of Delaware Valley Dal Nogare Award was presented Monday morning to John G. Dorsey, the Katherine Blood Hoffman Professor of Chemistry at Florida State University, by Mike Koenigbauer, President of the Chromatography Forum of Delaware Valley.

Four years ago, problems were slightly different for HPLC users. However, one main problem remains the same and will continue to remain the same.

Good Morning and welcome to Day 2 of LCGC's coverage of Pittcon 2008 from New Orleans, Louisiana. We have already seen many informative and innovative press conferences and technical sessions, as the rate of technical development in the field of analytical chemistry continues to advance at a staggering pace.

The city of New Orleans has a rich history of merging French and American art, from the iconic fleur-de-lis to the works of Edgar Degas. Unfortunately, sometimes art, whether it's a painting, book, or some other medium, gets damaged due to unforeseen disasters. It is the job of the scientist to pursue the restoration of such precious objet d'art. These types of art recovery efforts were described in the session "Science for Art" at Pittcon 2008.

I attended session 220, "Sample Preparation: General," on Sunday afternoon. As Frank Dorman of Restek Corporation, who presided over the session noted, the weather here is much nicer than it was last year in Chicago, and he was happy to see a good crowd gathered for this session.

Given the historic and crucial relationship between New Orleans and the sea, it was appropriate to kick off the Pittcon week with a nautical-based session.

A proud student filling in for his esteemed teacher highlighted the first day of technical sessions as Pittcon returned to the Crescent City.

Sunday afternoon's plenary lecture at Pittcon 2008 was presented by Dr. Leroy Hood, President of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Washington. The lecture was preceded by the Pittcon Heritage Award presentation, which was awarded to Hood.

Pittcon 2008 got off to a great start here in New Orleans. The liquid chromatography sessions at the Ernest N. Morial Center were interesting and informative, such as the session entitled "Liquid Chromatography at the Extreme: Ultra-pressure and High Temperature."

Good morning and welcome to this, LCGC's third year of live, daily coverage from The Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy.

High performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) enhances throughput in countless processes, including environmental analysis, dissolution testing, separation of biomolecules, and total drug analysis. To take advantage of the benefits of HPLC technology, samples and solvents must be cleared of particulate contaminants. Doing so protects instrument components and minimizes maintenance costs. This article outlines HPLC technology, explains the importance of sample preparation, and reviews the factors that must be considered when preparing HPLC samples by membrane filtration. The data from experiments to test these factors show that the physicochemical characteristics of membrane filters can affect HPLC results.

Since 1950, Pittcon has served as a platform for recognition of scientists whose pioneering research helped make dramatic advances in their specific disciplines. The Spectroscopy Society of Pittsburgh (SSP), one of the two sponsoring societies that organize Pittcon, first presented its Spectroscopy Award in 1957 and has recognized the work of leading spectroscopists since. The second Pittcon cosponsor, the Society for Analytical Chemists of Pittsburgh (SACP), began recognizing leading analytical chemists with their annual award in 1978. The list of award recipients is a "who's who" of scientists, including Nobel Laureates, whose work advanced scientific discoveries at an amazing pace while laying the groundwork for the development of modern day instrumentation in mass spectrometry (MS), inductively couple plasma (ICP), Fourier-transform (FT)-IR, and hyphenated instrumental techniques.