January 27, 2017
by Sanji Bhal, Director, Marketing & Communications, ACD/Labs
At the beginning of each year, I find that people have a renewed focus and are motivated to do their best work and make positive changes. In an effort to help separations scientists succeed in 2017, we decided to launch 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.
We completed our first webinar last week; but don’t worry, if you’d like to learn more check out our free on-demand recording of the presentation here. It 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’ll be hosting the final two webinars in the coming months which will explore more complex method development scenarios where software can come in handy. Here are the details:
- Webinar II (February 14, 2017 at 11:00 a.m. ET): The second installment, “5 Ways Method Simulation Software Will Help you Save Time, Energy, and Resources,” will explore how scientists can speed up and improve method optimization efficiency with modelling software. The webinar will investigate linear and non-linear models, automatic peak tracking, and more.
- Webinar III (March 8, 2017 at 11:00 a.m. ET): The final installment, “A 5 Step Strategy to Improve Complex Method Development with Software & Automation,” will explore systematic strategies to approach method development. The webinar will look at tools and strategies that will help scientists achieve robust methods that follow quality by design (QbD) principles.
We hope you’ll join us for the second and third installment of the webinar series. For more information and to register, visit: http://www.acdlabs.com/SmarterMethDevWebinars
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