Category Archives: chromatographic specialties

chromatographic specialties, supplyside, Trade Shows

Update on Pickering Activities

Since October, we’ve traveled across North America and to China to bring awareness to some of our new markets and products, as well as created some new application notes and posters:

Las Vegas, NV
Supplyside West and AHPA’s Botanical Congress

The SupplySide West meeting and Expo is held in Las Vegas every year. This year it was held at Manadalay Bay Resort & Casino from October 6-10. Laszlo, Saji and I were on hand to present our systems and applications for the Natural Products industry.  Our  applications on Amino Acids, Vitamins, Antioxidants, Mycotoxins, and Glyphosate, among other are applicable to this market.

On the Friday following the show, the American Herbal Products Association held their 2nd Annual Botanical Congress. This was a very exciting and interesting meeting all about Natural Products. For the meeting, we presented our posters:

Amino Acid Analysis in Supplements and Sports Drinks
Analysis of Theanine in Tea (an amino acid)
Aflatoxins and Ochratoxin A in Herbs and Spices

Galveston, TX
Gulf Coast Conference

The annual meeting of the Gulf Coast Conference was held for the final year in Galveston, Texas (it moves to Houston in 2015). Taken from their website, “The Gulf Coast Conference is an organization oriented toward the education and advancement of galvestonknowledge of Chemical Analysis Technology associated with the Petrochemical, Refining, and Environmental fields, and will forward this goal through annual technical meetings, regular communications, and training courses focused on these fields.”  I went down to Texas to check out the meeting and to determine whether it may be a good fit for our GPC cleanup systems for use in the Environmental testing field.

Vancouver, BC
SETAC Annual Meeting

The Society for Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry held their annual meeting in dextechVancouver, British Columbia in November. Saji and I were there to present our new Dioxin cleanup system, the DEXTech to the environmental chemistry group. The new DEXTech can cleanup of samples for the analysis of dioxins and PCBs — and do so quickly and efficiently.

Check out the brochure HEREvancouver

Our Canadian distributors, Chromatographic Specialties, were also on hand and were a big help to the success of the meeting.

Hangzhou, China
Ameritech’s Marketing Communications and Customer Appreciation Meeting.

Held on November 20, 2014. Mike and I traveled to Hangzhou, China for the meeting.  You can read more about it in Mike’s report here

aflatoxin, Amino Acid Analysis, carbamate, chromatographic specialties, Chromatography, clean-up, eluvac, freestyle, glyphosate, GPC, herbal products, HPLC, immunoaffinity cleanup, lctech, Multi-residue Mycotoxin Analysis, mycotoxin, natural products, natural toxins, New Products, Ninhydrin, ochratoxin, pickering laboratories, pinnacle pcx, Pittcon, post-column derivatization, spe

Pickering Exhibits at Pittcon 2013

This year’s Pittcon was held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania from March 17-21, 2013.

view of philly from the museum On display were Pinnacle PCX, EluVAC, and a video of the FREESTYLE Automated Sample Preparation Instrument.  The video was a new technique for us, and it was well received.

The video in our booth was a combination of the separate videos for each module of the FREESTYLE Automated Sample Preparation Instrument. You can view the originals here (they are very informative, and we highly recommend them): FREESTYLE VIDEOS

Wendy, Mike and David enjoyed visiting with existing and future customers, as well as our distributors from around the world, including our Canadian distributor, Chromatographic Specialties.

Before the show opened, we had the opportunity to explore the city.  Philadelphia is one of our oldest cities and is full of history and landmarks. Some of this editor’s favorites include Independence Hall and the surrounding neighborhoods, and the Art Museum (see more below).  On this trip, we explored Reading Terminal Market, and sampled that famous cuisine, the Philly Cheese steak Sandwich. I’m told it is not truly a Philly Steak sandwich unless you have it with Cheez Whiz. Any type of real cheese doesn’t count. I made that mistake on my first trip to Philadelphia, and the man behind the counter let me know it!  I wasn’t about to make that mistake again:

philly cheesesteak

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is known for its amazing collection of artwork (viewed on a previous visit), but is also made famous by the scene of Sylvester Stallone running up the stairs in the movie Rocky.  Since the author of this entry happened to be training for a race, she decided that a little cold wasn’t going to stop her. So she put on her iPod (Rocky Theme playing, of course), and ran from the hotel to the top of the steps and back (total distance: about 2.8miles).

view from the bottom

wendy philly top of steps

wendy rockyOn the return to the hotel, I came across a version of the LOVE sculpture, by American Artist Robert Indiana. I always thought it was was much bigger…

love sculpture

 

For those of you interested in learning more about the sculpture, click HERE

If you’re ever in Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art is definitely worth a visit.

But if you can’t make the trip to Philadelphia, you could also stay home and watch Rocky…

chromatographic specialties, wctow

Western Canada Trace Organic Workshop

By Wendy Rasmussen

Held in Edmonton, Alberta, from May 9-11. Rebecca Smith and I attended the 46th Annual WCTOW. The meeting is a place where scientists can meet and present their work, and to learn about new challenges, applications, and methods.

We have attended this workshop in the last couple of years so that we could support our distributor in Canada, Chromatographic Specialties, but also to meet and get to know our current and future customers in western Canada. 

Some highlights included the measurement of antibiotics excreted by cattle and how antibiotics in manure spread on the ground as fertilizer can ultimately run off into the drinking water. Another interesting topic, especially for Alberta, is the question of identification of napthenic acids in water and soil to determine whether is naturally occurring or whether it is due to environmental contamination by oil refineries.

After the meeting, we had to good fortune to visit a few laboratories in Edmonton and Calgary.
ameritech, analytica, analytical technologies, chromatographic specialties, cromatec, eprw, laprw, lctech, pickering, wctow

International Connections, by Laszlo Torma

The “Pickering Brand”

The “Pickering Brand” is well known all over the world. Thanks to our customers and our dedicated distributers, Pickering Laboratories instruments and methods are utilized in more and more countries. In order for us to offer better service and communication we have been expanding our participation at international meetings.

Pickering Laboratories is regularly represented at the Latin American Pesticide Residue Workshop (LAPRW). The first LAPRW was held in Brazil (2007) and Wendy Rasmussen and I were representing our company. We worked with Roberto de Souza Cruz of Cromatec. The second LAPRW (2009) was in Argentina and David Mazawa and I were representing Pickering Laboratories. We visited our distributer Victorio Bogunovich of Analytical Technologies. We had great cooperation from Analytical Technologies; sharing booth space during the meeting and were able to visit their facility. In Argentina the level of interest and knowledge of participants was much better than the first workshop. At both meetings we had the pleasure to meet lots of interesting people. In Latin America, like other parts of the world many Laboratories are struggling to purchase high performance and high cost instruments. In Argentina during a general discussion, many people expressed their anger about the very high cost of instruments like LC/MS/MS and requested reliable methods with affordable instruments. Latin American countries are using large amounts of glyphosate and are interested in reliable analytical methods in crop and environmental samples. It seems to me that glyphosate is an emotional and political issue in Argentina. The next LAPRW meeting is in Montevideo, Uruguay in 2011.

In 2009, David Mazawa attended BCEIA, China’s largest conference on analytical instruments. David worked with our distributer Ameritech and enjoyed meeting potential customers and as well as their hospitality. You can read more about this trip in our January 2010 Newsletter.

Recently Wendy Rasmussen and David Mazawa represented Pickering Laboratories at Analytica in Germany. Analytica is similar to PITTCON but they meet every second year and it has become larger than PITTCON in recent years. Wendy and David were assisting our distributer and business partner LCTech GmbH during the show. They also received training on LCTech’s new products that we are marketing in the USA.

Wendy Rasmussen and David Mazawa represented Pickering Laboratories at Analytica in Germany

Wendy, David, and the LCTech team at Analytica

In April, Wendy and I attended the Western Canada Trace Organic Workshop in Vancouver, Canada. We are presented 2 posters; and Wendy gave a presentation on “Sample Clean-Up with Immunoaffinity columns and Gel Permeation Chromatogphy”. We had a great time and we especially were glad to meet with our distributor, Chromatographic Specialties as well as some current and (hopefully!) future customers. Chromatographic Specialties have a great product range and offer wonderful support all accross Canada.

In June, I will attend the European Pesticide Residue Workshop (EPRW2010) in France. This will be my fourth EPRW meeting. EPRW meets every two years alternating with LAPRW. I will work with our distributor LCTech and visit with our customers. Scientists and pesticide regulators from all over the world will attend this meeting because it is considered by many to be the best pesticide residue workshop. In addition to the Europeans, the attendees are from Africa, Asia, Latin America and North America. This meeting allows me an opportunity to visit with laboratory personnel with different scientific backgrounds, from different parts of the world.

And last but not least, we are regularly participating as exhibiters and presenters at PITTCON and AOAC International. Even though these meetings are in the USA there are lots of foreign scientists attending and this gives us additional opportunity to cultivate our relationship with them.