Chromatography Forum

They make some pretty amazing claims. Parts per billion sensitivity AND qualitative and quantitative analysis all from a unit the size of a toaster oven. Anyone know anything about these?

http://www.estcal.com/

Here are a couple of test reports of medical cannabis generated using this equipment. Please tell me what you think.

The web site shows characterization of mold grown in cultures. The "test report" shows the analysis of a cannabis sample, with a report for mold. An entirely different situation.

Pesticide analysis by GC - It’s done all the time. But with some sample preparation on the front end, and often a mass spectrometer on the back end because of the issues of coelutions. The detector used in that GC system does not have this kind of selectivity - and there will be many coelutions coming from the cannabis sample.

An analysis for "fertilizer"? - This statement says absolutely nothing. There are parts of any natural plant that are components in some fertilizers. Are they measuring potassium, phosphate and ammonia - or are they measuring for fecal contamination?

A proper test report should show specific analytes, levels detected and limits of detection. The statement "FDA approved technology" does not tell much.

If these folks are the expert witness, I'd want to see results where their testimony was used in trail. I just strongly suspect that we are back at fertilizer.

Don,

Thanks for your response. I am trying to learn all I can about this technology. I own a cannabis testing lab in Michigan (not the one who issued the report) and I ran across these reports. All sorts of stuff stuck out to me, and I'm relatively new to cannabis chromatography. We use GC/FID and GC/ECD to perform purity and potency analyses, btw, not one of these 'sniffers'.

One thing I noticed, was the supposed detection of amphetamine in one of the samples. I have seen no evidence that suggests that cannabis produces amphetamine, so it's either an error, or someone put it there. Either way, I don't think it's legal to sell amphetamine laced medical cannabis.

The claim of a genetic 'fingerprint' stinks like fish, too...

Surface acoustic wave detectors are popular in small mobile GCs that are sold as e-noses, mainly because they do not need fuel gasses like an FID. They seem to work well for a few restricted applications, but I have only seen results from very fast GC separations that produced fairly crude fingerprints that were matched to some standard or compared to one another. Since the "identifications" are based only on retention times, and the separations are crude, they are not to be trusted for any complex sample.

The mechanism of SAW detection depends on adsorption of analytes to the detector, which is likely to make SAW detectors difficult to interface with temperature programming.

The report, in large part is just bull####, like a lot of what comes out of fringe therapy. Anyone who thinks that mold, fungus and mildew are bacteria has been smoking something.

Peter

That entire report is a bunch of bull.

Thank you for your replies, everyone!