The Column - June 2008 - (Page 11)

June 2008 www.thecolumn.eu.com The Column News News Liverpool hits Riva del Garda A chromatography group from the University of Liverpool, UK took the recent International Symposium on Capillary Chromatography (ISCC), Riva del Garda, Italy by storm last month with their oral presentations and posters, which reportedly obtained excellent reviews. The chromatography group, led by Professor Peter Myers, has been established at the university for just over one year and comprises Dr Haifei Zhang, Dr Abbie Trewin and Dr Dominic Banks. The President of the ISCC, Professor Pat Sandra stated that to achieve such excellent and novel research within one year was truly outstanding. Professor Myers and Dr Banks presented their work on dynamic field gradient focusing. This technique of electrofocusing was first put forward by O’Farrell and demonstrated by Ivory. More recently Lee has used variable geometry channels to obtain electric field gradient channels and Myers has shown the benefits in miniaturizing the technique in a paper he has written on separating proteins. In all these methods the electric field was balanced against a constant hydrodynamic flow. This flow has commonly been generated from a syringe type pump. To date, dynamic flow has not been achievable because of the problems in delivering a very constant, controllable flow in the order of 0.1 µL min-1. In their ISCC paper Myers and Banks showed how using a computer controllable, very stable and accurate pump could deliver the flow-rates required. They were able to show separations using both dynamic flow and dynamic field gradient focusing. Dr Zhang presented new work on aligned porous monoliths that he believed could be used in chromatography by describing how directional freezing was used to prepare aligned porous structures from water-soluble polymers, such as poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA). The aligned PVA structures were produced by slowly lowering an aqueous solution of PVA into liquid nitrogen. The frozen solution was then freeze-dried to yield a 94% porous cylindrical monolith. The pore-size distribution measured by mercury intrusion porosimetry was found to be bimodal with peaks at 3 and 10 µm. Dr Trewin, in her poster, showed how it may be possible to use molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to study new silica systems and so become unique imaging tools. She described how a working amorphous model was obtained by using a crystalline structure and then how it was randomized using a set of MD annealing steps that reproduce structural features of actual amorphous silica. Dr Jones (Centre For Materials Discovery, Liverpool, UK) supported the group who attended the conference with his poster on superheated water. In total the Liverpool group presented four posters, one plenary lecture and one keynote lecture. This contribution was only outnumbered by the major established research centres in Ghent and Sicily. In his closing address Professor L. Mondello, vice president elect of the ISCC encouraged the Liverpool group to continue their work and invited them back to the next ISCC meeting in Riva del Garda in May 2010. He hoped by this time that they would have established the UK as a leading country in chromatography, just as it had been in the 60s and 70s when Archer Martin and Richard Synge received their Nobel Prize for chromatography. For more information, visit http://www.liv.ac.uk/chemistry Link: www.liv.ac.uk/chemistry 11 http://www.thecolumn.eu.com http://www.liv.ac.uk/chemistry http://www.liv.ac.uk/chemistry

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Column - June 2008

The Column - June 2008
Contents
Sensory Quality Control of Food and Packaging Products
News
Incognito Conferences and Exhibitions – Worthwhile or Not?
Market Trends and Analysis
Tips and Tricks: GPC/SEC How Do I Calibrate a GPC/SEC System?
Analysis of Macromolecular Branching by Triple Detection GPC/SEC

The Column - June 2008