Recently, one of my colleagues from the UK emailed a link to a resource that should be helpful to chromatographers, both new to chromatography and experienced in chromatography: Guide to Sample Preparation (link to registration page to order the poster; a hard copy of the poster will be mailed to you. You can also click the image and it will take you to the registration page.). You can hang this complementary poster in your lab or office for quick and handy references on how to deal with samples.

The focus for the October 2011 issue of the Food Additives and Contaminants journal was applications for liquid chromatography (LC) and high-resolution Mass Spectrometry (MS) in food safety and it has five peer-reviewed customer articles featuring our instruments! Normally, this journal allows subscribers to view articles online only so we purchased copies of the articles so that they can downloaded for free online. The articles will be available for downloading until March 1, 2012 so if you are interested, please go to the links below and download.

Question: If you had a lot food of samples to extract and not a lot of time or money to do it, how would you extract?

Our answer: Since we didn’t have a lot of time, room, or additional funding we used the QuEChERS technique.

David Steiniger, Senior MAD Scientists in the lab, worked with the procedure as written and adjusted it into something that we could use with the Ion Trap GC/MS system.  It also worked ridiculously well with the Triple Quadrupole GC/MS. The quechers flowchart, in the attached file, that he came up with simplified the process to the point where even the MAD MANager could do it, that would be me.