HPLC and GC Articles

Jack Rhodes, the long-standing marketing director of the Perkin-Elmer Corporation (now PerkinElmer, Inc., Shelton, Connecticut) in the second part of the 20th century, used to introduce me as the guy who was present at creation (meaning gas chromatography). I always tried to correct him, saying that I only joined the field a few seconds after the Big Bang.

The previous installment of this column (1) surveyed the challenges in obtaining high quality results in bottom-up proteomics, the sources of variability in proteomics experiments, and the difficulty in comparing results obtained from different laboratories using different sample preparation procedures, different instrument platforms, and different bioinformatic software.

To much the same degree as in any other technical field, as the global economy shrinks and metamorphoses, chromatographers are challenged by the changing professional landscape.

Many of us use liquid chromatography (LC) methods supplied to us by others. These can be compendial methods — those that come from one of the pharmacopoeia — or they can come from the scientific literature or from another laboratory within our company.

The 34th International Symposium on High Performance Liquid Phase Separations and Related Techniques, which alternates between Europe, Japan, and North America, was held, for the first time, in Dresden, Germany from June 28 to July 2, 2009.

Cyclodextrins (CDs) are cyclic oligosaccharides composed of D-glucose units that are linked by α(1,4)-glucosidic bonds. The practically important, industrially produced CDs are α-CD, β-CD and γ-CD which differ in the number of glucose units involved [i.e., α-CD contains 6 glucose units, β-CD has 7 glucose units (Figure 1) and γ-CD has 8 glucose units].

In the past decade high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) has emerged as a technique for the separation of complex proteomic samples because of its outstanding chromatographic resolving power,1–3 the possibilities to automate the analysis (ease-of-use and outstanding reproducibility)4 and its compatibility with mass-spectrometric (MS) detection using electrospray (ES) interfacing.5–6

I have been at the helm of LCGC Europe for over a year and it's a pleasure to work on a magazine that is held in such high esteem by its readers. The publication is truly a team effort with the editorial advisory board playing a pivotal role in the magazine's success.

Penicillin G (PG) is widely used for therapeutic or prophylactic purposes to treat cattle diseases. PG might be applied in the form of procaine salt to achieve longer lasting activity. PG procaine (PGp) is a combination of PG with the local anaesthetic agent, procaine, and is slowly absorbed into the circulation and hydrolysed to PG.

This is the fourth "LC Troubleshooting" column in a series looking at different aspects of the calibration process for liquid chromatography (LC) methods.