This week the 34th International Symposium on Chromatography (ISC 2024) took place in Liverpool. Anneli and Gordian went to check it out and share our most recent work on chromatography and beyond. Liverpool treated the researchers in chromatography with a nice, sometimes even sunny, weather and a fantastic gala dinner in the world fifth largest cathedrals.
The conference started off already on Saturday with special courses. Gordian participate
d in a Fundamentals of liquid phase separations course by Bob Pirok and Peter Schoenmakers as part of the release of new book on Analytical Separation Science. The book is available for ordering.
A great part of the conference was dedicated to fundamentals in chromatography, multidimensional separation and HILIC was of great focus. To Anneli’s positive surprise a lot of research in chromatography is devoted to understanding the retention mechanism, especially in HILIC, better and to characterize different column as described by Stoll et al. and Rutan et al.
Furthermore, nontarget screening was in focus of three sessions and came up in many more. Regarding broad picture of separation techniques, the complementarity of LC, GC and CE was stressed. Surprisingly many works used only in house libraries for suspect screening to improve the annotation confidence. It was also a pleasure to see that new publicly available HRMS and RT datasets are becoming available, e.g. in RECETOX project.
On the last day Anneli gave an overview of the recent development in Kruve lab for prioritization and identification of the chemicals detected with LC/HRMS in water samples. The presentation can be found here. Gordian presented his work on leveraging retention time for prioritizing candidate structures in nontarget screening with LC/HRMS.