Working to Automate Micro-Extraction

By Microextraction Tech - November 07, 2014

I am a regular reader of this blog, which I find relevant and interesting, so I am pleased to have this opportunity to introduce the Anatune blog to a wider audience and encourage more people to read it.

Anatune is a company based in Cambridge, UK and we specialise in the automation of GC-MS sample preparation and injection. We provide upgrades to existing instruments, but best of all, we like to deliver complete, integrated systems where the sample preparation works seamlessly with GC-MS.

We are very proud of both our laboratory and our team of applications chemists; we regard our lab as the heart and soul of our business.

We do a lot of interesting work, most of it relevant to current problems that analysts are faced with, and we like to share what we are doing. We also like to hear opinions from other people outside the company.

We have a great interest in micro-extraction in all of its forms, because we believe this is where the future lies. Manual sample preparation remains the slowest, most expensive, most error-prone part of analytical chemistry and if you have to work with large samples sizes, automation remains technically difficult and expensive to build.

The good news is that as every generation of GC-MS offers better signal to noise ratios, and so the range of tasks micro-extraction can perform grows continuously – for a given detection limit, you can afford to work with smaller and smaller samples.

Micro-extraction is a scientifically interesting field of work. Unfortunately, as a commercial company, we have restrict most of our laboratory time to devising practical and robust solutions to problems that our customers will pay us for solving.

Hopefully, this keeps our work, and our blog, relevant to people who analyse samples for a living.

I believe that, while it is fun to broadcast interesting and useful material via, the internet, this isn’t a goal in itself. The real objective should be to stimulate contact between like-minded people to the point where they feel the desire to meet face-to-face.

Then real innovation begins and tangible things start to happen.

The Anatune Blog is an active record of the most interesting things we do. If you want to follow our work, please follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook – alternatively, you can subscribe to receive notifications by email.

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