An end user shares how her company uses mass spectrometry and how she went about selecting the MS systems in her facility in a brief Q&A.

This month Lab Manager poses four questions on GC usage, likes, and dislikes to a panel of five experts

Process GC involves the deployment of rugged, reliable gas chromatographs in demanding process environments. Where traditional sampling and analysis occurs off-site in analytical laboratories, process GC brings the “lab” to the production site, providing realtime product analysis.

The proverbial “ounce of prevention” goes a long way toward preventing serious GC downtime. Keeping up with routine maintenance is the secret to ensuring that scheduled maintenance downtime occurs on the lab’s terms, not by fickle fate.

Thermo Fisher’s Eric Phillips, describes the adoption of MS detectors in GC as a “technology shift” that began with single-quad MS as an alternative to standard GC detection modes.

Capillary columns have changed the face of GC since their introduction about 35 years ago. The most obvious change involves resolving power: up to 50,000 theoretical plates on a 30-m capillary versus 1500 on a six-foot packed column.

Despite steadily losing ground to high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) over the years, particularly for polar compounds, gas chromatography (GC) remains one of the more rapid and efficient chromatographic methods.

Collaborative research is one of the justifications cited most often for acquiring lab data software. While such “soft” benefits are difficult to quantify, the “hard” benefits are easy to measure, after some digging.

Laboratories are awash in data. The two main data management packages in use today are laboratory information management systems (LIMS) for structured data such as pH values or sample weights and electronic laboratory notebooks (ELNs) for unstructured data such as images and chemical formulas.