Taking Stock of the Mass Spectrometry Marketplace
With May's ASMS Conference now receding in the collective rearview mirror of the industry, the summer is as good a time as any to take stock of the analytical chemistry marketplace. This year's show, held in Salt Lake City, Utah, demonstrated once again the vitality and robustness of the field of mass spectrometry, as innovation and technological advancement were in evidence everywhere you looked.
With May's ASMS Conference now receding in the collective rearview mirror of the industry, the summer is as good a time as any to take stock of the analytical chemistry marketplace. This year's show, held in Salt Lake City, Utah, demonstrated once again the vitality and robustness of the field of mass spectrometry, as innovation and technological advancement were in evidence everywhere you looked. New instrumentation and product introductions were abundant, and if there was any doubt that MS resisted the recession, there can be no doubt that the recovery has begun for this vital segment.
David Walsh
And as always, the Current Trends in Mass Spectrometry series (and on a broader scale, Spectroscopy and LCGC in general) reflects the rapid pace of development in the market. If there is a topic or topics that dominate the technical sessions at a conference such as ASMS, you will surely see it covered in these pages. This month's issue contains research articles on topics such as utilizing UHPLC–MS for identifying pesticides in baby food. This has been a consistently hot topic since the baby formula scare several years ago, but this particular article represents the emergence of LC–MS techniques in this application area, which was formerly dominated by GC–MS and other techniques. Add to this an article targeting the biomedical community on urine analysis with LC–MS-MS and an article examining the use of new MS software for identifying volatile organic compounds in consumer products, and we think you'll see most of the most critical issues currently facing the research community and society as a whole represented in this volume.
Finally, for a recap of mass spectrometry's premier event in the 2010 ASMS Conference, please see article titled "58th ASMS Conference Review" of this issue. Whether you are a chromatographer, a spectroscopist, or do research in another field that utilizes MS techniques and instrumentation, LCGC and Spectroscopy continue to represent two of the analytical chemist's most valuable resources.
Enjoy the issue.
David Walsh
Editor-in-Chief
AI and Infrared Light Team Up to Advance Soil Carbon Monitoring
May 19th 2025A team of international researchers has developed a faster, more accurate method to analyze soil carbon fractions using mid-infrared spectroscopy and deep learning. Their approach preserves the chemical balance of soil organic carbon components, paving the way for improved climate models and sustainable land management.
Analyzing the Protein Secondary Structure in Tissue Specimens
May 19th 2025In the first part of this three-part interview, Ayanjeet Ghosh of the University of Alabama and Rohit Bhargava of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign discuss their interest in using discrete frequency infrared (IR) imaging to analyze protein secondary structures.
How Do We Improve Elemental Impurity Analysis in Pharmaceutical Quality Control?
May 16th 2025In this final part of our conversation with Harrington and Seibert, they discuss the main challenges that they encountered in their study and how we can improve elemental impurity analysis in pharmaceutical quality control.
