HPLC and GC Articles

Recently, I had the opportunity to participate in Colacro XII, a chromatography symposium held in a Latin America country every two years. This year's meeting was held in Florianopolous, Brazil, 27–30 October. During the symposium, I perused the large number of applications posters for the sample preparation techniques being used.

This article provides an overview of the use of solid-phase microextraction (SPME) in the fish oil industry to monitor oxidation products in marine oils.

There are two main types of field portable instruments for monitoring chemicals in air samples. The first type includes (hand) portable systems based on sensors or selective detectors where no chromatographic separation is involved.1 These instruments are generally used in cases where the target application is well defined (e.g., one compound or a class of compounds).

The accurate measurement of vitamins in conventional dietary supplement tablets and dietary supplement drinks that are consumed widely by the general public is of utmost importance. Vitamins are necessary for proper body function, and consuming too little or too much can be harmful to an individual's health.

Introduction of modifications into the protein backbone or its amino acid side chains following the translation of the mRNA code enables a single polypeptide chain to be transformed into diverse species with enhanced or modified biological functions.

In an ideal world, chromatographic peaks always would be perfectly shaped, symmetrical Gaussian entities, but in the real world of inlets, columns, and detectors, much can happen to distort peaks' shapes and lead to peak tailing — the appearance upon elution of a significant portion of a peak's mass away from the apex toward later times.

Why Do Peaks Tail?

There seem to be a disproportionate number of problems encountered in the concentration region near the limit of detection and lower limit of quantification with calibration curves used for liquid chromatography (LC) methods. Some of these problems relate to improperly selecting the model used for calibration.

Pittcon 2009, the 60th Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy, was held in the massive McCormick Place in Chicago, Illinois, on March 8–13, 2009, the sixth time the Conference has been held there. This year's event hosted nearly 1000 instrument manufacturers and laboratory suppliers in more than 2200 booths.

Experiments using inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) as a detection system for reversed-phase chromatographic methods have been conducted for the analyses of various pharmaceutical compounds. Interfacing the ICP-MS instrument to the high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) system was straightforward.

Prion diseases, also known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs), are a unique group of neurodegenerative diseases of the central nervous system, which include bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle, scrapie in sheep, chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer, and Creutzfeldt–Jacob disease (CJD) in humans.