Highlights of Recent Instrument Development
The Shepson group and the Jonathan Amy Instrumentation Facility staff have developed environmental instrumentation for use in polar environments to analyze air, sea water and ice-pack samples at the ppb level and below for trace environmental contaminants. Along the way, completely new instrumentation has been developed for airborne vertical flux studies via fixed wing aircraft. Moored aerostats (streamlined balloons) have been used to lift specialized instrument packages for long atmospheric sampling studies in polar environments. Video clip (lower right) shows the group's Arctic Ozone Buoy—a research collaboration where remote environmental data is sent via satellite.
Professor Kenttamaa is presently operating the highest field ICR mass spectrometer in operation for high mass studies of ion cluster chemistry. She is also operating prototypes of Ion-Spec FT-MS electronic equipment on her existing superconducting magnets and dual cell detector systems.
The Raftery group is developing dual path NMR/MS metabolomics instrumentation. This development is based on earlier work on microprobe NMR probes. Here, combined HPLC followed by NMR and/or MS is able to isolate metabolite patterns that appear to be characteristic of patients in early disease states when they are asymptomatic. Hopefully, these techniques will be amenable to mass screening at low cost.
Professor Low is presently operating an improved ektacytometer. The device is used to stress red blood cells such as to determine the effect of experimental cancer therapies on living (human) cells in vitro prior to clinical studies.
The DESI atmospheric MS induction and ionization technique was developed in the Cooks group. It is now being commercialized for lab-based and miniature MS instruments.
Two Purdue PhD students established Griffin Analytical to manufacture miniature ion trap MS instruments based in part on their graduate work. The firm's production of this equipment is sold out for approximately two years in advance.