Good Chemistry

Volume 9 Issue 4 | May 2014

Cover Story

Good Chemistry

By Bernard B. Tulsi

Latest mobile offerings deliver greater efficiency, security, and compliance

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Featured Articles

Marketing Your Lab

By Lynda Seeger

Analysis, elbow grease, and legwork can bring in new business at little or no cost

The Human Side

By Peter Gwynne

Managing culturally diverse teams

Sections

Editor's Buzz

Breaking Down Silos

It is not news that the research workplace has changed considerably over the past decade. As with many businesses, laboratories have come under pressure to generate better results with ever greater efficiency.

Leadership and Staffing

Techniques for Managing Cross-Disciplinary Teams

By now we all know that the life sciences industry is radically changing

Organizing People

As a consultant and professor, I see it all of the time. Organizations are structured to fail. We make it almost impossible for some people to succeed. One simple example (which we can detail in another article) is mixing short term and long term oriented groups under one manager.

Laboratory Technology

Document or Die

Why keeping track of everything is essential in the cell culture world

Ask the Expert

Selecting the Right Informatics Management System

Steve Thomas, an investigator within the Drug Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics department at GSK, talks to contributing editor Tanuja Koppal, PhD, about his experiences implementing a database ofmetabolic knowledge that helps the company store, share, and search data around the globe. The process involved analyzing internal needs, evaluating several options, and finding the right informatics solution to give GSK scientists access to each other’s findings to prevent error, repetition, or inefficiency.

Lab Health and Safety

Breath of Fresh Air

Respiratory protection basics

Lab Health and Safety Tips

Make Learning How to be Safe an Integral Part of Education, Work, and Play

For too many years at academic institutions and some companies, health, safety, and the environment have been something extra. It's time that they become part of the process.

Product Focus

Product Focus: Laboratory Gas Generators

For David Hemmig, director of equipment sales at Matheson Tri-Gas (Basking Ridge, NJ), the key word in on-site gas generation is reliability. He explains that a major problem with gas generators that incorporate some sort of compressor is that eventually that component fails.

Product Focus: Microplate Readers

Life scientists started using microplates in the 1950s, with some of the first ones literally machined from solid blocks of plastic. You don’t need to wander around a molecular biology lab long today to see the progress in microplates, some now including thousands of wells.

Product Focus: Mass Spectrometers

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.

Product Focus

Product Focus: Viscometers

The ease of adding ketchup from a squeeze bottle to an order of French fries, the trouble that it takes to press toothpaste out of a tube, and many other common needs depend on viscosity.

Product Focus: LIMS

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.

Products in Action

How LIMS Are Enabling the Mobile Lab of the Future

Imagine that you’re a field technician for a public water provider. Your company is committed to supplying clean, safe drinking water to millions of people, so it has implemented a sophisticated water sampling program to ensure water is free of contaminants.

Research-Specific Labs

Perspective On: A Food and Beverage Lab

Situated in rural Weyauwega, Wisconsin, the Agropur Dairy Cooperative plant continues the rich cheese-making tradition of the state through its production of both cheddar and feta cheese.

INSIGHTS

INSIGHTS on Imaging Systems

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.

Laboratory Technology

Pittcon Roundup: Pittcon Partnerships

In addition to the products introduced at Pittcon 2014 we’ve already profiled in our Technology News section, there were plenty of other exciting developments to share from the press conferences we attended in Chicago in March.

May 2014 Technology News

This month, we highlight companies who will be exhibiting at the 62nd ASMS Conference on Mass Spectrometry and Allied Topics (ASMS 2014), which will take place June 15-19, 2014 at the Baltimore Convention Center in Baltimore, Maryland. This dynamic scientific conference features a variety of sessions and short courses and will close with an event at the National Aquarium. Please note that the products shown here may not be at the show, but their manufacturers will be.

Surveys

Cold Storage Survey 2014 Results

Freezers and refrigerators are an integral part of any laboratory that requires temperature controlled storage.

2014 ELN Survey Results

Electronic laboratory notebooks (ELNs), one component of a lab’s information infrastructure, help laboratories capture and manage knowledge, streamline data management, protect intellectual property and foster collaboration. Both non-specific/generic ELNs (which compete directly against paper notebooks) & application/task-specific ELNs exist, each with their own fans.

2014 Pipettes Survey Results

Pipettes can be found in almost every laboratory and, if you’re looking to buy one, there are many options— manual or electronic, single or multi-channel. Luckily, a few main considerations can help in deciding whether or not to buy the latest pipette technology.

Maintenance Matters

Maintenance Matters: Centrifuges

“It’s extremely important that the user keeps an eye on the status of the rotor, maintains it properly, cleans it, and prevents aggressive chemicals from getting in,” product manager says

How it Works

3D Cell Culture and Fluorescence Imaging

Problem: Assays using immortalized cell lines and plastic labware have been used for decades as an in-vitro mimic of how a putative drug may work in the human body. The last decade has seen attempts to improve the physiological relevance of these assays by the incorporation of human primary cells that better reflect human biology both from a drug efficacy and toxicity perspective. At issue with the use of primary cells is the relative difficulty in tissue culturing and maintenance for long-term studies relative to immortalized cell lines.

Products in Action

Microscope to Microplate Reader - Increasing the Throughput of Live Fluorescent Protein FRET Assays

Filters vs. Monochromators - When using a microplate reader, these are the two options to filter light into monochromatic wavelengths. Filters offered higher performance because of greater light transmission and wider bandwidths; monochromators offered greater flexibility, no new filters were needed for each new assay.

DART Technology for Cannabinoid Screening

Rapid Identification of Synthetic Cannabinoids in Herbal Samples via Direct Analysis in Real Time Mass Spectrometry— R. A. Musah, M. A. Domin, M. A. Walling, and J. R. E. Shepard, Rapid Commun. Mass Spectrom., vol. 26, no. 9, pp. 1109–1114, 2012.

How to Protect Clinical Researchers & Testing Analysts

In clinical lab environments, as in any laboratory using chemicals, work processes pose an inherent risk of hazardous chemical exposure for operators and for the lab environment.

Five Things to Know Before Buying a Liquid Temperature Control Product

When buying a new liquid temperature control product, there are a number of factors to consider when picking a product.

White Papers and Application Notes

Performing Promega’s ADCC Reporter Bioassay with Tecan’s Infinite® 200 PRO and GCM™

Antibody-dependent cell-mediated cytotoxicity (ADCC) is an important target for antibody-derived biopharmaceuticals, allowing the controlled targeting and destruction of tumor, virus-infected or other diseased cells. Promega’s ADCC Reporter Bioassayoffers a convenient way of assessing ADCC using frozen, thaw-and-use effector and target cells, eliminating the need for cell culture maintenance.

Products in Action

Streamlined Workflow, Expanded Selectivity, and an Orthogonal Technique for Your Laboratory

Giving you the power of normal-phase LC, but with the ease of use of reversed-phase LC, convergence chromatography is a broad-based, complementary analytical platform that is taking its place as an essential separation technology for modern laboratory analysis.