
CURRENT ISSUE | VOLUME 8 - ISSUE 3 | April 2013
COVER STORY
Going Greener
Equipment vendors continue making strides to reduce energy use and consumables.
Editor's Buzz
Lab Design and Furnishings

Business Management
Leadership and Staffing

The slogan of the micromanager may well be “If you want something done right, do it yourself.” However, “Micromanagement stifles initiative and kills motivation,” according to a very successful manager, World War II General George S. Patton. Despite this, many of us have worked for micromanagers and some of us (this author included) have even been micromanagers. Why do people micromanage? How can micromanagers change their ways?
Laboratory Technology
Ask the Expert

Scott Martin, Ph.D., team leader for RNA interference (RNAi) screening at the National Institutes of Health, Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, talks to contributing editor Tanuja Koppal, Ph.D., about recent trends in the use of different types of cells and reagents for screening drug targets and cellular pathways.
Lab Health and Safety
Lab Health and Safety Tips
Product Focus
Research-Specific Labs
Surveys

When it comes to common technology in a laboratory, centrifuges rise toward the top of the list. Centrifuges separate particles and structures suspended in liquid by applying thousands of gravitational force equivalents to the sample through spinning and play a role in a wide range of workflows and applications.
INSIGHTS

One trend evident in science generally, and for laboratories in particular, is the desire to do things faster, more reliably and economically, at a higher level of hardware and method robustness, and all with a less-specialized workforce. This is especially true of mass spectrometry, where users no longer need a Ph.D. to operate MS systems.

Sample preparation reduces sample complexity and renders samples into a format amenable to downstream analysis. Sample prep is most necessary for complex, multicomponent samples containing substances that interfere either with the MS (e.g., through ion suppression) or, in GC/LC-MS, the chromatography.

MS originated as a stand-alone technique for volatile compounds. Next came the ability to volatilize high molecular weight materials through heating. The emergence of electron-impact ionization MS was a natural, as GC analysis requires volatilization. Find out what the future of MS holds.

In this month’s edition of INSIGHTS, our panel of four experts discusses the types of MS analyses and experiments they run and the top factors they consider when buying MS instrumentation. We also explore the trend of the shrinking mass spectrometer in a Q&A sidebar with 1st Detect president and CTO Dave Rafferty.