Chromatography Quiz #33: “What the Brij?”- RESULTS

Pickering Labs would like to congratulate all of our winners for our previous newsletter’s I’m not seeing any peaks! Carbamates edition Quiz: Tom Schneider from Suffolk County Water Authority, Narjes Ghafoori from LA County Environmental Toxicology Lab, and Jiufeng Fan from Glaxo Smith Kline, and Dr. David Green from Pepperdine University.

Winners will soon receive: An HP Sprocket Portable Photo Printer! A fun-size, Bluetooth enabled, cherry-tomato, portable photo printer! Just in time for those holiday selfies with family and friends! Or even better, those festive ugly sweater parties with your colleagues! We’re looking forward to sharing plenty of selfies with Onyx, our 2020 influencer!

Congratulations to our quiz winners!

Thank you all for your submissions!

The correct answer for the “What the Brij” Quiz:

The Brij-35 prevents quenching of large molecules. When large molecules, like the Fumonisins derivatives, quench they fold in on themselves and can lead to a reduction in fluorescent signal.

Here is a lovely answer we received from one of our quiz entries, if you want to get more in depth:
The Brij-35 is a non-ionic surfactant that, as far as I’m concerned, is a nearly miracle additive to HPLC eluent buffers to improving retention characteristics of strongly adsorbed proteins from the column surface. In my experience, it has the added […] benefit of enhancing the fluorescence intensity of the fluorescent derivative produced in the post-column reactor. The fluorescence enhancement is due to the derivative being trapped in the non-polar core of the Brij micelle. This enhancement can be extremely significant: 100s x improvement in sensitivity. It is well-established that a non-polar chemical environment improves fluorescent quantum efficiency by stabilizing the HOMO-LUMO molecular orbitals.

Chromatography Word Puzzle #34

Correctly complete the word puzzle below and win a prize! Simply email your answer and your full contact information to Rebecca at rlsmith@pickeringlabs.com by January 31st, 2020 in order to win. You will receive email confirmation when your submission is received, and the troubleshooting answer and winner congratulations will be published in the next issue (to be anonymous, please notify Rebecca in submission).