I’ve been meaning to write a post for a couple of weeks detailing the state of play of my current analytical projects but I’ve been awfully busy helping my MSc student get the last of her LC-MS data on cherry anthocyanins and phenolics. We managed it in the end and she has a lovely result so I spent last week broadening my focus again and picking up some of the projects I’d had to put aside. Most of last week I also spent trying to derivatise reducing sugars for a collaboration with some lovely people from the Human Potential Centre at AUT’s Millenium Institute. This is a really exciting capability as sugars are notoriously hard targets to analyse chromatographically. We currently use a gas chromatographic method which involves a quite lengthy and fiddly acetylation procedure but I’ve found a compound that works really nicely for liquid chromatography with a relatively simple derivatisation procedure. There’s also lots of potential to push the analysis into larger oligosaccharides and glycans, with at least two exciting projects already on the table. I’m hoping this might result in two publications, the first being method development and the second an application.

I’ve also started developing a quantitative method for bile acids and have been approached to quantify lignin-derived phenolic compounds in sediment and plant material from estuarine habitats across the South Pacific. Very exotic! At some point I’d like to get some more method development done on neonicotinoid pesticides as I’ve developed a very cool and powerful extraction method which may solve the recovery and sensitivity problems. Again, definite options to present this as a method development and validation paper so no details yet.

😉