I am pleased to feature three upcoming complimentary webinars, which constitute a series on drinking water compliance using Ion Chromatography, (link to register for all three webinars) in this blog post.

Around eight years ago, I was an applications chemist, and I would demonstrate GC triple quadrupole mass spectrometers. At that time, even though that it wasn't too long ago, the technique was still considered as high-end or research for many labs. I was developing methods weekly and was lucky to see many of the different and interesting applications of the technology. That said, the task of developing an extensive multi-residue pesticide method in a short space of time was always laborious and challenging. This was, of course, (as Murphy's Law would indicate) the most popular request.

One of our recent enewsletters was focused on HPLC and mass spectrometry solutions for bioapplications and listed two on-demand webinars, featured in this blog post, for improving workflows in proteomics research that I thought would be useful for scientists working in the field.

I am happy to report that this is my first blog post for Chromatography Solutions, and that I will now be blogging about a mix of chromatography topics—from stories about our customers’ successes and human interest, to reviewing journal articles, webinars, and trends in relevant industries.

This is my first blog post for 2013.  You will not have noticed this but it took two times to type the correct year, apparently my fingers are still stuck on 2012.  Let’s talk about doing more with less in the gas chromatography laboratory in 2013. Over the past years we have come to realize that everything and everyone in the lab must be able to do more with less.  This does not mean that we need to work all day every day. This means that we all need to be flexible to meet all challenges as they come in. Gas chromatographs in the past have been systems that are purchased in one configuration and were difficult to change. If you didn’t have the time or engineering resources it was impossible to change. During this webinar you will discover how a GC can be reconfigured to meet the always changing needs of the laboratory.

Wishing our blog readers a very Happy Holiday break! As some of our blog readers may be aware, we hosted a series of four webinars on our newly released High-Pressure Ion Chromatography (HPIC) technique this year. The  webinars have been extremely popular with analytical chemists, and I thought the holiday break would be a great time for those who had missed the webinars to view them at leisure!

Here's part 2 of the Q&A from the webinar on High-Pressure Ion Chromatography (HPIC) featuring the very first commercially available charge detector for IC.

Standardization of gas chromatographic methods and requirements can be a very good thing.  I will bet that you noticed, just as I did, that when you implement new methods they cause unintended consequences in the rest of the lab.  When I first started running gas chromatographs and GC-MS in the laboratory we did all we could to try to meet method requirements.  I would complain about having to meet specific requirements because they would cause me problems in some other part of my work.  For instance, extractions needed to be done differently, internal standards were to be added at a different point in the preparation, new reports needed to be created, QC requirements needed to be learned, and probably have to buy new GCs with a new configuration.  It was not just the method or meeting the QC requirements.  The efficiency of the laboratory was impacted for quite some time.  This is more than method development.  This is decreased efficiency and increased cost in the gas chromatography lab.   

Regular readers of this blog know I don't blog about webinars until they are done and available on-demand so that readers can view them at their convenience but here is one that I simply had to blog about because of how much of the good, the bad, and the ugly of biofuels has been in recent news.

Recently, we presented two webinars for LC-MS methods in proteomics research and they were both so popular that they really serve a blog post devoted to them and also give our blog readers an opportunity to view them!