Developing 3D Separation Systems for Complex Analyses

My Dutch name, Pieter Schoenmakers, and in English, Peter Schoemaker. And I'm Professor of Analytical Chemistry at the University of Amsterdam. I'm a electrical chromatographer originally, and I still am, and so that's my upbringing. We do other things as well like Gas chromatography, Supercritical chromatography. And we have two directions. One is better methods, make chromatographic methods work better, and the other one is completely new ideas, new science.
So we do different separation methods, and especially we like multidimensional methods. Two-dimensional methods exist, a lot of people are using them. Two-dimensional gas chromatography is mature, two-dimensional liquid chromatography is still developing. There's still things to be improved and problems to solve. We use that for a lot of applications together with all kinds of people from industry and from other science areas.
And then, we think of three-dimensional separations, and the way to do it is not using three columns. I believe that is what I call spatial. It's following up on older ideas like Thin-Layer chromatography or 2-DE gel electrophoresis in space, I call it, in a plane. But then, if you add a third dimension and you go down into a space and block, then theoretically, there's a, it's fantastic.
We talk about a million pix if we can do it, and that's what we're working on very hard. The driver, where we started out from, is proteins and peptides. There's tens of thousands of proteins in our system, and if you do a digest, there's hundreds of thousands of peptides.
And to separate those is an immense task. And if you don't separate, you don't see the local striation and they may be very relevant. So that's why you need so much separation there. And if you don't have a drive application, you think about what else is very complex? There's many other areas where the examples are very complex. And one is food science.
And our food is so incredibly complex that if you really want to separate that out, it's complex. The question is, would you want to know everything that is in there? But we can find out more than we know now. Yeah. We use the analytical technologies, like separations and mass spectrometry and detector systems.
But one technique we have embraced and we need I think now is 3D printing. We have several printers in the group. We have people that can design, that can print. We are looking into the materials to print with. It's fantastic because we can do a very rapid prototype. Whatever ideas we generate now, we can fairly quickly make something, see if it works, then improve, and then it really works.
We can have it printed for a few hundred dollars in a real good material like titanium. So that's fantastic, that development. We, my policy is we don't have one. So, some of my colleagues have one kind of systems. But we have 2D-LC systems from all the four major suppliers.
So, we have the Agilent, which is all together as a commercial system, but we have Waters 2D-LC, Shimadzu 2D-LC, Thermo 2D-LC. And we build the systems ourselves, so we assemble them. We don't make pumps, but we put things together to two-dimensional systems or much more complex systems.
We couple all kinds of things together. One thing that I mentioned, the three-dimensional system, that is a dream that we're trying to actually make come true. If we get some kind of working prototype of that, it doesn't have to be the million pix yet, but something that works would be a great achievement of my group, you know, because it's the young people in the lab that do it.
But if you look around, I think a lot of our chemistry is still improving so dramatically. Even say, the main techniques are from the previous century, which is correct. But if you look at what we could measure and how we measured it in the previous century, then we do see fantastic improvements.
And I think for society, it's really important that we can measure, and that we can do lots of measurement accurately. Again, our environment needs this. Our food safety needs it. Our health systems need it. So, I'm still looking at all these improvements in analytical chemistry and see we need them.
It's great.