Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I hope you have been enjoying this very hot start to the European summer and making the most of this week's long sunny evenings. As we approach the midpoint of the year it seemed an appropriate time to get in touch and let you know about our recent changes here at Reach HQ. I write this newsletter from our new (thankfully) air conditioned office at Biocity. The change in office space occurring to both create more space in the laboratory and to allow us to welcome a new member to the office team, Janine Sey joined Reach last month as a Finance Coordinator. Welcome to the team Jan! The empty office next to the laboratory did not stay empty for long and is now home to our brand-new QC lab, continue reading to find out more.

And of course, the start of summer means the start of conference season. Freshly back from Prague we'll also be in Dubrovnik and Toulouse over the coming weeks. You can find out more on our website

As always, if you have any questions or comments drop me a note, Victoria Coulthard, (v.coulthard@reachseparations.com), Business Development Manager.

Quality results

Three more graduates will be joining us this summer and this continued growth has allowed us to develop a specialised analytical laboratory. Our analytical instrumentation is now all located in one area where all screening and final quality checks will take place. This is great news for clients - all samples are now seen by an extra pair of eyes. A method is identified and optimised in the QC lab, solvents chosen or excluded according to stability information provided by the client, it is then purified by a separation scientist in the laboratory and returned to an independent QC scientist for final analysis.

Effective chiral screening

Finding the balance between screening quickly and achieving the optimum method is always tricky. A quick screen is essential to ensure purification can start quickly but a sub-optimal method can lead to time consuming second passes and occasionally a reduced yield. An array of chiral stationary phases is crucial to finding both more and better methods but the more columns the longer the screening time. To help minimise the time taken in screening we've introduced a tier system. This is an evolving process that has identified the most popular phases and solvent systems for the samples we are currently seeing in the laboratory. Tiers one and two consist of 18 methods and currently provide solutions suitable for scale up for more than 75% of the samples we see and can be run in three hours. This work was presented at the ChromSoc Spring Symposium in May, for more details contact the lab.