MM’s QuEChERS cSPE GCxGC-ECD of PCBs and PBDEs at FPRW, or, Why Does this Blog Title Only Consist of Acronyms?

Michelle Misselwitz of Restek's Innovations group presents her poster at the Florida Pesticide Residue Workshop

I only have time for a brief report from the Florida Pesticide Residue Workshop as I get ready to go to a full day of talks and meetings.  Michelle Misselwitz of Restek’s Innovations group presented the poster, “The QuEChERS Extraction Approach and Comprehensive Two-Dimensional Gas Chromatography of Halogenated Persistent Organic Pollutants in Cow Milk and Human Breast Milk”, yesterday, and it was very well received.  Milk sample preparation procedures for organic chemical analysis can be very time-consuming, and Michelle is working on a much quicker method, focusing on polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), with the determinative step being a GCxGC-ECD method involving Rxi-XLB and Rxi-17Sil MS columns.  The XLB does an excellent job separating important PCB congeners in the first dimension and the 17Sil MS allows the separation of PBDEs from PCBs, which is critically important given that an ECD is used and PCBs and PBDEs elute in the same fraction from silica cartridge cleanup.  The work is novel enough to have garnered an invited talk at the Dioxin conference in Belgium in August.

More later...