Spectroscopy-06-01-2005

A review of the five-day conference dedicated to promoting mass spectrometry and its allied topics held earlier this month in San Antonio, TX.

Spectroscopists separate light from the sun into spectra and look for the presence or absence of particular lines that give hints regarding its chemical composition. The same method can be applied to studying the composition of other matter in the universe.

This paper discusses two atomic force microscopy (AFM) techniques that have been used successfully to quantify step movement: direct and indirect measurement. The benefits and difficulties associated with each method are discussed.

Therapeutic drug monitoring is performed routinely by liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC–MS) using instrumentation and methods originally developed and systematically configured for the high-volume, high-throughput analysis of drugs of abuse. An example of LC–MS monitoring of the drug clozapine and its metabolite, desmethylclozapine, is detailed along with a description of the overall system architecture, workflow, and maintenance routines that support a large-scale clinical therapeutic drug monitoring program. The relative advantages of LC–MS over immunoassay and LC–UV, the current standard techniques for therapeutic drug monitoring, are discussed in the light of these results.