Dried distillers grains with solubles (DDGS) are the dried remains of the production of ethanol from corn by fermentation and typically is sold as a high protein livestock feed that increases efficiency and lowers the risk of subacute acidosis in beef cattle (link to Wikipedia page).

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 FAQ questions from the previous post: GC-MS/MS Multi-Residue Pesticides Analysis FAQ (1). (Do visit the post for details on the on-demand webinar and other resources.

Last month, we hosted a very popular webinar, titled, Implement High Quality, Routine GC-MS/MS Multi-Residue Pesticides Analysis with ease, (link to on-demand registration page) and the viewers had many questions about the GC-MS/MS solution discussed in the webinar, and why the GC-MS/MS method is one of the fastest growing techniques in routine pesticides testing.

For ordinary grape juice to turn into wine, the sugars in the grape juice interact with yeast to produce ethanol and carbon dioxide, and the grapes (along with the seeds and skins) at this stage of fermentation called grape must. (Of course, it is not so simple otherwise more of us would be attempting to make wine with grapes from the grocery store, and the wine industry would not be a multi-billion dollar industry.)

After the fairly recent blog post on the use of ion chromatography for the analysis of beer quality, it initially seemed a bit soon to be blogging another application for beer but upon reflection I thought this was a great application to share as you will find out in this post.

Stories on the detection of the veterinary anti-inflammatory drug phenylbutazone in horse meat in Europe (link to news story) surfaced a few weeks ago, and I am sure those working in the field of food testing have been following what the food safety regulatory bodies in Europe will do very closely.

Happy Belated St. Patrick's Day! I meant to send the first of this two-part post out on the actual day, which was March 17th but did not get to it in time. By the way, did you know that the original color associated with St. Patrick's day was actually blue (and not green) and was called St. Patrick's Blue? Eventually, the green of the shamrock that St. Patrick holds in his hand became a political color for the Irish, and this is how green came to be associated with St. Patrick's Day.

Readers of this blog might remember a blog post last year that discussed HPLC and Ion Chromatography analysis of melamine in milk and pet food last year using UV detection, and when I received notice of this fast LC-MS method, I thought it would round off our melamine analytical solutions nicely with three different techniques!

The safety and purity of olive oil is back in the news with several stories including a University of California at Davis report suggesting that restaurants and food service organization raise the bar for olive oil quality control (link to downloadable PDF) and Australia pushing for raising the level of campesterol, a sterol used to indicate adulteration, in olive oil (link to story). (The Australian argument is that virgin olive oils could naturally have higher levels of campesterol due to seasonal, varietal or geoclimatic reasons.)