New article on the miniGC and miniLC

The miniGC and miniLC were recently featured in a paper by Prof. James Grinias and his group at Rowan University in LCGC North America titled “Exploring the Implementation of Compact Chromatographic Instrumentation in Common Analytical Workflows”.  As the title implies, Prof. Grinias and his group explore some interesting application areas where compact, affordable chromatography systems may be applied to common chromatography applications.

Exploring the Implementation of Compact Chromatographic Instrumentation in Common Analytical Workflows

In this paper, they use the Lucidity miniLC to analyze over-the-counter (OTC) drug compounds, where they find that “updated compact instrumentation can achieve similar performance to existing commercial instrumentation, but with reductions in overall size and cost” allowing users in this space to deploy the miniLC in more locations to do more testing of their products because of the size, cost, and ease of use of the miniLC while maintaining the results they are used to seeing from their conventional HPLCs.

The Grinias group also reports on its work with tracking free fatty acid (FFA) levels in human plasma.  They are developing methods on the miniGC for FFA profiling so that the samples may be tested where they are collected for preliminary screening, whereas these samples are typically not tested where and when they are collected, but rather they are sent off to a testing lab for GC-MS analysis.  This immediate and point of need miniGC data can then be referenced against the central lab GC-MS testing.

“Although MS has advantages over FID in terms of sensitivity and mass identification, the added detector size can make it difficult to implement directly in clinical research spaces, similar to the aforementioned POC environments. To achieve the benefits of both approaches, collected samples can be tested twice: once with the miniGC system directly after the sample is obtained for rapid preliminary screening and later with more routine GC–MS methods in a testing laboratory for confirmation of results”

In addition, the authors note that they expect to use both the miniGC and miniLC in their teaching curriculum, where cost, ease of use, and size are all important factors.

For a link to the article: https://www.chromatographyonline.com/view/exploring-the-implementation-of-compact-chromatographic-instrumentation-in-common-analytical-workflows