EFASIGatWWEM2016 meeting, November 02, 2016
The International Centre, Telford, Shropshire
Report to The BMSS
The EFASIGatWWEM2016 meeting was held at The International Centre, Telford under the umbrella of WaterWasteEnvironmentalMonitoring2016 Conference & exhibition following an invitation from the organizers, David Hellyer and Marcus Pattison of WWEM who generously offered EFASIG, free registration, facilities and refreshments.
The meeting comprised two sessions, am and pm, and a discussion session. The first session was mainly devoted to Aspects of Comprehensive Chromatography and when coupled with Mass Spectrometry.
The Keynote speaker was Prof. Dr. Peter Quinto Tranchida from the University of Messina, who had stepped in at very short notice to replace his colleague, Prof. Luigi Mondello, who had to withdraw for serious personal reasons. Peter Tranchida delivered an excellent introduction on the topic reviewingGCxGC/MS and LCxLC/MS for the Analysis of Environmental and Food Matrices.
Bob Green from SepSolve introduced his company’s innovative work on the recent development of a flow modulator followed by an application entitled Comprehensive insights into tobacco smoke using flow-modulated GCxGC-TOF MS. Chris. Hopley from the LGC reviewed the application of comprehensive chromatography to reference materials, in a presentation on, Multidimensional chromatography for the certification of environmental reference materials. David Smith of Scientific Analysis Laboratories demonstrated why GCxGC was of particular importance when using a conventional GC detector, FID, and without the need for MS in a talk on The Application of GCxGC-FID to Environmental Hydrocarbon Analysis.The final presentation of the morning session was give by Leon Barron of Kings College, London on a very appropriate topic entitled Suspect screening of emerging contaminants using liquid chromatography-high resolution mass spectrometry and in-silico methods. The analysis involved the monitoring of appearance of target analytes in ThamesRiver water at intervals during the week which was highly relevant considering the remit of the meeting designed so as to fit in with that of the WWEM organization.Leon was particular complemented as he had managed to arrange to attend and present even after the arrival of his second child less than two weeks previous to the meeting.
Session 2 was devoted to Aspects of the applications of chromatography mass spectrometry to water and environmental matrices including the involvement of Ion Mobility Mass Spectrometry. Roberto Sommariva from the University of Leicester, gave an account of the application ofReal-Time Mass Spectrometric Analysis of Hydrocarbons from Crushed Shale, in which he mapped out the abundance and distribution of shale strata in England. Several interesting question were posed in relation to the production of shale gas for commercial purposes. John Thompson from the University of Birmingham gave an extremely authorative review entitled, Using refillable diffusion tubes for VOCs, SVOCs and oxygen-sensitive VOCs for calibration of PTR TOF MS in relation to his involvement in Tracer Measurement Systems Ltd. Ashley Sage, the current vice-chair of The BMSS, and from SCIEX, also presented an eminently suitable review of Screening and Quantitation of Emerging Environmental Pollutants in Drinking and Waste Water using Targeted and Non-Targeted LC-MS/MS Workflow, which fitted in well with the WWEM remit. As a featured complement to the applications comprehensive chromatography, Eimear McCall of the Waters Corporation gave an extremely interesting account of theEnvironmental Screening of Water Samples Utilising Ion Mobility Enabled High Resolution Mass Spectrometry. This topic again was highly relevant to the general theme of the meeting and item 2 in the ensuing discussion session. The final presentation given by Mark Barrow of the University of Warwick, on Analytical Methods for Profiling of Water from the Athabasca Oil Sands Region using FTICR-MS was highly topical from several standpoints and gave an insight into the analytical problems facing the commercial exploration of oil sands, focusing upon industrial and environmental water samples.
The discussion session was highly debated and discussed. The first item was presented by John Thompson on analytical validation in which he talked through the validity of data and the base foundation. He argued that the statistics are highly questionable and there frequently is a miss-quote of the calculated parameters, LOD and LOQ. The question posed was would the statistics be valid in litigation.
The second item centred on increased peak capacity, a question for comprehensive chromatography and chromatography mass spectrometry. Several points were presented and debated. The outcome was that there was merit in both the use of conventional comprehensive chromatography alone and in conjunction with mass spectrometry.
Several speakers have since e-mailed their complements about the success of the meeting and one comment was that a small meeting is good and often better than a larger meeting being more focused and generating a closer interaction of the participants.
Finally, the EFASIG wish to thank and acknowledge the WWEM2016 organizers, David Hellyer and Marcus Pattison for generously providing the venue facilities, free registration of the delegates as visitors and refreshments during the day.
Peter J Baugh
EFASIGatWWEM2016 Co-organiser
EFASIG Leader (The BMSS)
1