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The Gold Standard for Identifying Substances

With the Olympics finally over NBC can start running the long awaited show Animal Hospital…Whether you watched every event that you could conceivably manage to watch or were unimpressed by the performances of the world’s finest athletes, the Olympics are a grand spectacle all the same. From rumors and scandals to triumphs and Cinderella stories, the Olympics has it all. Out of all the doping rumors and scandals, only one athlete’s

We have gas chromatography to thank for keeping the competitions at the Olympics fair and steroid-free. Well, more specifically gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, which is a combination of the two methods. It’s the “Golden Standard” for tests used to identifying a particular substance’s presence in a given sample. The same method is used for forensics, detection of illegal narcotics and for tracking organic pollutants in the environment.

The process is similar to fractional distillation, both of which separate different components of a mixture primarily based on vapor pressure differences picked up by a pressure sensor. The right pressure sensor must be selected for the process because pressure sensitivity is crucial for the processes. False readings may occur because substances can hide behind others of both the same elution time and higher concentration.

As useful as gas chromatography is for many applications it is not as accurate as popular culture suggests. In the crime show CSI the forensic team can tell everything about a substance within the hour (or at least that’s my impression, I don’t actually watch the show). The real process actually does not positively identify most samples. Professionals need to know what they are looking for and test for that specific substance.