Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The primary focus of our research program is to design highly automated miniaturized and integrated instrumentation for the isolation of organic materials from complex matrices as well as the subsequent separation, identification and quantification of these species. The development of new analytical separation methodology for the rapid and efficient determination of organic substances in trace amounts poses a significant challenge to the contemporary analytical chemist and has major implications not only for chemistry but also for the biological and environmental sciences and medicine. Traditionally, a key component of trace methodology has been slow, labour intensive sampling and sample preparation steps. We are actively pursuing solvent-free approaches, which can integrate both sampling and sample preparation steps. We are investigating membrane, needle, and fibre in addition to syringe configurations for this purpose. A significant, fundamental component of our research is to increase understanding of the extraction processes by developing mathematical models and verifying them using experimental data. This allows us to develop convenient extraction devices and appropriate calibration procedures. The major new directions include developing particulate extraction technologies as well as investigating and monitoring single cells and eggs using the micro sampling/sample preparation technologies coupled to micro instrumentation, which have been developed in our group. The other major direction of the research is to design whole column imaging detection technology for high efficiency capillary separation techniques. These methods allow simultaneous monitoring of separation in several capillaries and result in short analysis times because of the use of on-line optimization and detection. On-line investigation of transformation and interactions of analytes is possible providing additional structural information about the analytes. At present we are applying this technology primarily to capillary isoelectric focusing (CIEF) and capillary electrophoresis in combination with absorption and fluorescence imaging. During the project, we will develop imaged multidimensional separation techniques.