Equipment vendors continue making strides to reduce energy use and consumables.

The creation of sustainable, high-performance and efficient buildings is growing in importance for companies and governments around the world for both economic and environmental reasons. In particular, laboratories are the focus of many of these reduction efforts as they are some of the largest consumers of energy due to the specialized equipment and ventilation systems required for safety and compliance.

From task lighting to zone systems, solutions abound for improving your lab's energy usage

The latest equipment, instrument, and system introductions to the laboratory market.

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.

According to one expert, the top service-related issue today is an unintended consequence of instrument sensitivity and stability

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.

Pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies have become leading MS customers. Because they work with human and test animal biological fluids and low-dose drugs, sample preparation takes center stage. Many of these workflows are automated for both sample and standards preparation.

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.

One product that can solve a key sample quality issue is BiOS, a new, third-generation biobanking system from Hamilton Storage Technologies

The Multi-Prep Laboratory Homogenizing System is one product that can simplify the labor and time of the typical homogenization process and make it easier for the end-user.

How can you add automation to your laboratory workflows in a way that is effective, efficient, and future proof?

The measurement of polydisperse nanoparticles in the region from 10 nm to 1000 nm in liquid is a challenge. Traditional light scattering methods such as dynamic light scattering (DLS), while being excellent for monodisperse samples, tend to skew results to larger sizes (and numbers).