After posting a recent story on our Facebook page (link to our page) on the shortage of liquid helium and some scientists think using helium to fill party balloons is wasteful (link to story), I recalled a couple of very popular webinars we did last year on moving from helium to hydrogen as a carrier gas in gas chromatography analysis of water as per U.S. EPA methods to save on escalating helium costs for laboratories.

This is very exciting news that I am sharing with our blog readers. Our improved ion chromatography method provides a sensitive, selective, and reproducible alternative to AOAC Method 999.14 for choline determination in food samples has been awarded First Action Official Method Status by the AOAC! You can find the approval listed on the AOAC Standards and Announcements page as First Action Official Method^SM 2012.20, “Choline in Infant Formula and Adult Nutritionals by Ion Chromatography and Suppressed Conductivity”.

Continuing the discussion on the use of Process Analytical Technology (PAT) to monitor process and product attributes during the development and implementation of a manufacturing process as in fermentation and recovery in biopharma production.

Three things came together for this blog post: first, late last month, I tweeted the troubling news that the 14-year long polystyrene foam ban in China would be lifted in May of this year, then I read people in China were concerned about the pollution from polystyrene as the ban was lifted, and finally, I received this research study on chicken embryos exposed to hexabromocyclododecane (HBCD) which is is a brominated flame retardant (link to Wikipedia page) used in polystyrene foam!

This topic is a new one for this blog, and highlights the use of Process Analytical Technology (PAT) to monitor process and product attributes during the development and implementation of a manufacturing process, as in fermentation and recovery in biopharma production.

Did you know the main ways that humans ingest toxic polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) (link to Wikipedia page) is through food and by inhaling indoor air and house dust? Last year, the NIEHS released a study on PBDEs that found "toddlers have a significant amount of exposure to PBDEs through house dust." (Link to story on NIH site.)

We just released a new ion chromatography suppressor (Thermo Scientific Dionex ERS 500 Electrolytically Regenerated Suppressor) and I thought our blog readers would be interested in learning about the new features of this particular suppressor.

Did you know that the harlequin ladybird (Harmonia axyridis) was introduced in North America as a natural predator of soybean aphids but now has spiraled out of control in many countries including the UK? (Link to Wikipedia.) Not only does this species of ladybirds exhibit swarming behavior and enter homes to winter, but but the ladybirds also release an unpleasant odor and have a tendency to bite humans.

In the fascinating environmental pesticides study featured in this blog post, researchers studied a well-preserved deposit of guano (which included egested insect remains) in the province of Ontario in Canada to determine if and how the diets of insectivorous birds, in this particular case, chimney swifts had changed with the application of pesticides, and, in particular, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) over a period of 48 years.

Our recent issue of the BioPharma enewsletter featured a recently released high-resolution HPLC glycan column (Thermo Scientific GlycanPac AXH-1 column) developed for the separation of charged glycans that coelute from conventional amide HILIC columns. This new column can be used for qualitative, quantitative, and structural characterization of uncharged and charged glycans present in biological molecules, such as proteins, by fluorescence detection (Thermo Scientific Dionex UltiMate FLD-3400RS Rapid Separation Fluorescence Detector) or mass spectrometry (MS) detection (Thermo Scientific Q Exactive Benchtop LC-MS/MS) methods.