Portable gas chromatography (pGC) is all about tradeoffs. Users demand value, reliability, ease of use, ergonomics, and measurement quality but with analysis limited to gases.

Care and maintenance practices for laboratory balances range from the sublimely simple to concerns about gravitational forces.

Chromatographers often need to balance the convenience of universal-use columns against the sensitivity and resolution of specialized columns. “Where labs may at one time have employed a nonpolar, all-purpose column, they now seek columns engineered for chemical families or even specific methods,” says Timothy Anderson, GC products manager at Phenomenex (Torrance, CA).

Method transfer between HPLC and UHPLC has been a standard complaint against high-pressure, sub-two-micron technology. Despite the accumulation of application notes from UHPLC vendors, end users continue to cite method transfer difficulties for not switching to UHPLC.

If the voluminous patent filings for new compressors, refrigerants, insulation, and power management are any indication, refrigeration technology is one of the most-researched engineering topics affecting lab operations.

Although the electronic laboratory notebook (ELN) market is mature, it has undergone several cycles during the past three decades. This existential back-and-forth has centered on whether ELNs should primarily serve as direct replacements for paper notebooks or something more.

Aside from safety, saving energy is the trend in fume hoods these days. Hoods are energy hogs that suck thousands of cubic feet of conditioned air per hour, 24 hours per day, out of buildings; replacement air must be heated or cooled depending on the season.

As leading instrument and column makers continue to innovate, legacy methods, particularly in highly regulated pharmaceutical and environmental industries, continue to nudge the state of the art toward greater robustness and familiarity and away from the cutting edge.

While fully manual operations can be built around microplate formats, doing anything substantive without a microplate reader is virtually impossible. Detection modes define the instrument’s experimental capabilities.

Biosafety cabinets (BSCs) protect lab environments and workers from potentially pathogenic organisms. Some types also protect samples from contaminants originating in labs.

Particle sizing methodologies range from straightforward sieving and sedimentation analysis to advanced laser-based light scattering techniques, microscopy/imaging, nanoparticle tracking analysis, and others.

According to a report from Persistence Market Research, Mass Spectrometry Technologies Market Assessment Report—Global Size, Share, Competitive Landscape, Future Prospects and Forecast from 2013-2017, mass spectrometry (MS) is one of the few instrumentation markets that has recovered fully from the last recession.

Despite being available for close to 30 years, laboratory information management systems (LIMSs) are about to undergo a metamorphosis characterized by greater utility, accessibility, and availability–at lower cost.

Imaging encompasses a wide range of techniques that enable visualization of hidden features of samples, structures, or organisms. Imaging occurs at many scales, from medical magnetic resonance imaging of patients to individual atoms. This INSIGHTS on Imaging Systems focuses on the lower end of size domains in the typical operating range of—but not limited to—microscopy.