One of the most frustrating things that we here at Biotage have had to deal with when we compare PFAS methods is the lack of a common naming convention for the compounds. It seems like every scientific article and every method contains at least one compound that either uses a new name or a new abbreviation and we have to spend excess time trying to confirm that yes, we're looking at the same compound. It's so annoying!
In this post I’d like to discuss the benefits of running routine maintenance procedures on your Biotage® 5000 Extractor system. There are a whole host of reasons you should be running routine maintenance on your extractor, the biggest of which is the cost savings from expensive repairs that might be needed if the instrument breaks down. Ensuring there is no cross contamination between samples, maintaining optimal performance, and prolonging the life of the instrument are a few other reasons why a small amount of your time now can lead to huge benefits down the road.
Have you ever heard about monitoring wastewater for Covid-19 outbreaks? If you haven’t, let me be the first to tell you that environmental chemists can monitor Coronavirus outbreaks on a routine basis. This procedure represents a scientific field referred to as Wastewater-Based Epidemiology.
We all know that we need to make sure that we have consistency and accuracy in our data. Determining and understanding the roots of user error is the easy part, but how to minimize or eliminate user error can be difficult. A critical point in the sample prep workflow comes when we move samples from processing to evaporation. This transfer step is where most accidents usually happen, be it mixing up of samples, mislabeling of collection vessels, or even dropping the sample, all of these scenarios are detrimental to analyses providing inaccurate results or no results at all.
If you are a chemist that is either a beginner or an expert in extracting per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) there are always going to be questions that come up after the extraction has taken place. Most often, questions occur at the concentration step. Such topics include water bath temperature, extract dryness, evaporation rates, and even water in the extract. How can one or all of the topics impact your analysis and where are good starting points?
I can remember asking myself this question many years ago at my first environmental laboratory job. I was manually shaking out separatory funnels for EPA 625 and 608 and each sample looked drastically different from the next as I was pouring them into each separatory funnel. At the time, I thought the term wastewater meant anything that came from a sewer pipe and that it mainly consisted of human waste. When I looked deeper into the possible sample categories for these methods, I was very surprised by the different sample types required to be tested as wastewater. With that, it prompted me to ask myself well where does it come from?
If you live in an urban area or city, then you may be familiar with paying a water bill for the water you utilize in your home. For the most part, this water bill covers the cost of water testing, treatment, and transportation from your regional water facility to your home. When you look at the life cycle of your tap water, the journey it takes to make it to your home is quite amazing.
Throughout my entire life I have always had an appreciation for water. Growing up in the Midwest, I spent my summers at the lake and winters in the snow. As a child, school taught me that water makes up ~70% of the earth’s surface and that most of that water is oceanic water (aka-salt water).
