January 27, 2017
by Sanji Bhal, Director, Marketing & Communications, ACD/Labs
In an effort to help separations scientists succeed, we launched a webinar series aimed at informing the scientific community about how software can assist and improve method development strategies. Hosted by members of the ACD/Labs’ technical and scientific services team—Anne Marie Smith, Brent G. Pautler, and Karim Kassam—the webinar series consists of three 30-minute sessions on a variety of topics relating to method development.
Our first webinar covered three ways software can simply and effectively speed up method development. Aimed at analysts starting out in the separations lab, or those unfamiliar with software beyond that provided with the instrument, the goal of this session was to provide an overview of simple software tools—both freely available and commercial solutions.
More specifically, Anne Marie and Brent walked participants through how databasing, physicochemical prediction and free chromatography tools can help you get started with a separation. As a vendor-neutral platform, ACD/Spectrus allows scientists to not only manage their separations data from different instrument vendors in one environment, but also any other analytical data that may be generated. A method database that is vendor agnostic and searchable by retention time and structure can be an invaluable resource to help get started on a method development project. Prediction of pKa provides insights into the optimal pH of a buffer and a variety of freeware and commercial tools are available to help analysts translate methods (from HPLC to UHPLC and vice versa) and assist in column selection.
If that sounds a little too basic for you, and you’re interested in more advanced tools to aid your work, we offered two additional webinars which explored more complex method development scenarios where software can come in handy.
The second installment, “5 Ways Method Simulation Software Will Help you Save Time, Energy, and Resources,” explored how scientists can speed up and improve method optimization efficiency with modelling software. The webinar investigated linear and non-linear models, automatic peak tracking, and more.
The final installment, “A 5 Step Strategy to Improve Complex Method Development with Software & Automation,” explored systematic strategies to approach method development. The webinar looked at tools and strategies that help scientists achieve robust methods that follow quality by design (QbD) principles.
About the Author
