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.

After applications and processes, workflow optimization is the primary consideration when setting up a cell culture lab. Workflow relates to how samples and cultures move through the lab, the number of operations going on simultaneously, and chain of custody.

In this Q & A, three experts from both academia and industry discuss the types of cell culture they perform in their labs, technologies they use, and the challenges they face.

As Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan famously noted, “The medium is the message.” So it is with cell culture, where media and feed or supplementation strategies have been responsible for more improvement in cell productivity and performance than any other factors.

Isolating facility and layout from equipment during planning and maintenance of a cell culture lab
entails considerable risk, if for no other reason than the latter must fit into the former.

Although cell culture is more than 100 years old, it has only been applied to the manufacture of biological drugs for about 25 years. Today mammalian cell culture is the workhorse production platform for most of biotech’s protein therapeutics and increasingly for cell- and virus-based vaccines.