news ANDI MS standard finalized ments in analytical chemistry and apply them in the environment. So the money will be spent mainly on instrumentation, including a range of new mass spectrometers, such as proton- transfer chemical ionization mass spectrometers, which have recently been developed.” He adds that his group will be one of the first to take these machines into the field to study environmental climatic processes. The team will also be acquiring an electrodynamic single-particle balance and coupling it to a new Raman spectrometer to investigate the processes occurring on individual aerosol particles at high ionic strengths. Mark Bradley heads one of the leading teams in the field of combinatorial chemistry at Southampton University. His group is one of the successful bidders for funding from JIF. They work on various aspects of combinatorial chemistry, including the development of novel “safety-catch” linkers for solid-phase synthesis and the analytical techniques essential to the identification and screening of products. Michael Dexter, director of the Wellcome Trust, says the funding will allow the U.K.’s scientific community to attract and retain the best scientists and to make it increasingly competitive. Scientists will flourish in the best facilities, he adds. Ironically, the announcement of funding to vastly improve science facilities in the U.K. comes just weeks after the government backed down on its controversial decision to refuse planning permission to the Wellcome Trust for its own infrastructure expansions at its “Genome Campus” in Hinxton, near Cambridge. David Bradley
After several setbacks, the Analytical Data Interchange (ANDI) protocol for standardizing MS data has been finalized by a subcommittee of the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM). A similar protocol for chromatography was approved in September 1998 (Anal. Chem. 1998, 70, 447 A–448 A; 1999, 71, 90 A). According to Lynn Matthews, chair of the ANDI subcommittee, both the chromatography and MS standards have now been successfully transferred from the Analytical Instrument Association (AIA) (now called the Analytical and Life Sciences Systems Association) to ASTM. ANDI, which began under the auspices of AIA, is an effort to standardize software for analytical instruments so that data files generated on one manufacturer’s system can be read by another manufacturer’s system. The responsibility for developing ANDI protocols was transferred from AIA to ASTM in 1997 (Anal. Chem. 1997, 69, 455 A; 589 A). Some believe that because the MS standard took so long to be approved, it is no longer of much importance to the analytical instrument manufacturers. “MS/MS data and MALDI are not even addressed in the standard,” says O. David Sparkman, an MS consultant who has been actively involved in the ANDI efforts. According to Matthews, however, the existing MS standard serves only as a baseline. “The next step is to revise the standard,” she says. The ANDI subcommittee has even looked into the feasibility of combining the chromatography and MS standards into one standard, she says. Whether the two standards are merged depends on what the market wants, says Matthews.
And that is the next phase for ANDI—determining what the end-users want. “We are going to be distributing questionnaires to the market. Up until now, the efforts have been mostly the analytical instrument vendors trying to agree on the standards.” Now, it’s time to listen to the other side, she says. The market has been using the ANDI standards for purposes other than for what they were developed. “ANDI protocols were developed to be able to take data from one manufacturer’s system to another’s and still be able to read it,” says Matthews. It turns out that “customers have been converting files to ANDI protocols so that they can store the data for long periods of time and have the confidence that whenever they need to retrieve the data, they can read it,” she explains. Because manufacturers revise their software on a regular basis, the ANDI subcommittee is considering round-robin testing of the standards on an annual basis. The first chromatography round-robin test is complete, and, according to Matthews, a round-robin test for the recently approved MS standard is expected to take place in the second quarter of 2000. “[But first], we need to get financing for this effort,” she says. The ANDI subcommittee has approached some of the major analytical instrument manufacturers for funding, but only a few have agreed to contribute to the treasury, which will be managed by ASTM. Sparkman has agreed to coordinate the round-robin testing of the MS standard. Matthews emphasizes that the ANDI protocols should be driven by the market, not the instrument companies. Anyone interested in participating should contact her at
[email protected]. Britt Erickson
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