Chromatography Forum

What is the strangest thing you have been asked to do it the course of your analytical career.
Working in agrichemical manufacture over the years I have looked at a few strange things for strange analytes. A lot of the time it has been looking for our products in strange places. In someones ear wax, on the sole of a shoe and even from a carpet. I have been asked what a brown sludge is (the answer of "brown sludge" did not go down well). I have worked with people who in previous employment have analysed dogs tears.
Maybe we should have a competition and a vote to see who wins.

GCguy

As for being asked to do daft stuff I was once asked to polish the flight tube on my sector MS so it "looked good" on a company video. I was also asked to fix a colleagues mass spec because he was getting no data. Turned out his printer had run out of paper. Love the idea of finding the wackiest analysis though.

I've done Kjeldahl analysis on chicken feed and chicken droppings (scary thing is how hard it is te tell them apart).

I've also done GC/MS on metabolites from freshly procured crab tissues (I had to dissect the crabs, incubate the tissues with marker solutions, prepare and inject the samples).

I've also done analysis on pork samples that I prepared by freezing in liquid nitrogen, then shattering in a Waring blender (very noisy).

I was required to measure the toluene content of a septic sewer after a drum ruptured draining into the sewer.

I had to sample while avoiding the 'solids' in the 5 gallon sealed container delivered to me.

A gas mask was required equipment. I was not allowed to perform headspace analysis. The GC column was thrown away after the calibration of the results.

Rod

Anions (organic and inorganic) by capillary electrophoresis and isotachophoresis in prostatic fluid, seminal plasma and cerebrospinal fluid.
Oh, and once I used vodka instead of acetonitrile in a reversed-phase ion-pairing separation of double stranded DNA. It actually worked surprisingly well. Can't remeber what happened to the left-over vodka....

Robert

A long, long, long, long time ago I developed this application that involved a step gradient. It worked beautifully. However, when I tried to do this with a fresh preparation of the second mobile phase, I was not able to get it to work.

I am still wondering, if the key ingredient to the separation was the fly that ended up in my mobile phase bottle...

I never made any attempts to validate this assay properly, i.e. with the fly in the mobile phase...

Further to Uwe Neues reply, we were once troubleshooting a gc in our QC lab. A very noisy baseline had us a bit baffled until we stripped the FID and found a small moth sitting on top of the jet.

I have also analysed our works chemical effluent, which after treatment is mixed with "non chemical" effluent before discharge. Everybody involved in this had to get a variety of innoculations before the work started.

Work can really make you sick!

I am still wondering, if the key ingredient to the separation was the fly that ended up in my mobile phase bottle...

And I though I had come up with some fly-by-night methods. Oops, here they come with the "special" coat.

When working as a technician on a collegue I had to:

Measure Vitamin E on seminal fluid from rabbits, the rabbit that had more Vit E had less oxidative strees, so was more fertile.

Measure sugars: arabinose, rhaminose,xylose, mannose...in different stages of maturity in seeds from brazilian typical trees

Cobalt on catle feces, cathecolamines in frontal lobe from laboratory mice (we needed a 5 digit balance to measure it!!)

Looks like a lot of us end up dealing with other peoples sh@t one way or another.
lol

How about extracting a license plate from a truck for PCBs. He (the driver) was accused of dumping toxic waste from his moving tank truck on a dirt road in the country. It did test VERY positive.

Well, I don't know how can I compete with our colleagues here but, let's try!

1. Organic acids by HPLC from cow ruminating fluid (fortunatelly I only get the samples in a vial...)

2. GC analysis of insect feromones, using a bug as the detector (quite funny, the poor animal had an electrode in the eye and another in the ass - I never understand how he could be excited!)

3. Degradation amines in putrefacted fish (just used a blender and a mask... no problem, except I still have problems eating fish today - 15 years later!)

4. Organic acids by HPLC from pork sausage (we had some problems to extract the stuff from saussage but the leftovers were quite tasty!)

...

2. GC analysis of insect feromones, using a bug as the detector (quite funny, the poor animal had an electrode in the eye and another in the ass - I never understand how he could be excited!)

3. Degradation amines in putrefacted fish (just used a blender and a mask... no problem, except I still have problems eating fish today - 15 years later!)

(or at least a front runner...)

I agree, DR.

I like Chromatographer 1's just for the concept of

"I had to sample while avoiding the 'solids' in the 5 gallon sealed container delivered to me."

Although I might be concerned about the homogeneity of the sub-sample.