The 33rd meeting of the Reference Material Committee of ISO, ISO/REMCO was held in Hangzhou (China) from 3 to 7 May 2010, and was hosted by the Standardisation Administration of China and the China Association of Standardisation. ISO/REMCO now has a membership of 70 members of the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) and liaison with 18 international organisations and seven ISO-internal committees. The new ISO TC liaison introduced at this meeting is with ISO/TC 158 “Analysis of gases”, with Dr Adriaan van der Veen acting as the REMCO liaison officer.

Starna Scientific’s Calibration and Reference Material manufacturing laboratory has extended its range of certified reference materials, providing a comprehensive range of UV/visible/NIR materials currently available under the scope of ISO Guide 34 + ISO/IEC 17025 accreditation for Reference Material producers.

ISO Standard ISO 17025 is the cornerstone of the “Measured Once, Trusted Everywhere” concept and the accreditation of labs and testing establishment to ISO 17025 by accreditation bodies underpins the credibility. ISO 17025 is all about facilitating the free movement of goods and services and so helps to eliminate monopolies, cartels and all sorts of anti-competitive activities.

Peter Jenksthe Jenks Partnership, Newhaven House, Junction Road, Alderbury, Salisbury, Wiltshire SP5 3AZ, UK

ISO 17025 has been with us now for 12 years and in some industry sectors it is getting hard to find a commercial laboratory offering chemical testing that is not accredited to ISO 17025 for some or all of its scope. In just 12 short years the importance of “quality management” to a laboratory has undergone a seismic shift.

Starna Scientific offers a lifetime guarantee on all Starna manufactured CRMs.

LGC, formerly the Laboratory of the Government Chemist, who provide chemical and biological analytical services and reference materials, has been acquired with management by Bridgepoint from LGV Capital in a transaction that values the business at £257 million.

John HammondStarna Scientific Ltd, 52–54 Fowler Road, Hainault Business Park, Hainault, Essex, IG6 3UT, UK

The Irish writer George Bernard Shaw once said: “England and America are two countries divided by a common language”. Whilst this statement generally refers to the over 4000 words in everyday use in the United States that are not in British English, in the scientific world “is it metre or meter”, or for spectroscopists, nanometre or nanometer?

However, irrespective of that debate, whatever the spelling, terms such as these have associated definitions, found in various reference texts, such as dictionaries, vocabularies or databases, and if we cannot agree on the spelling, what chance of achieving consistency in definition?

Fortunately, help is at hand, and it is the recent introduction of a “Concept Database” by ISO which has prompted this article.

Detailed below are just a few of the “databases” now available, and examination of the term “Resolution” is used as an example of each.

Starna Scientific has introduced an updated customer feedback system to assist compliance with ISO 17025:2005 guidelines. www.starna.com

Peter Jenksthe Jenks Partnership, Newhaven House, Junction Road, Alderbury, Salisbury, Wiltshire SP5 3AZ, UK

The 12th Biological and Environmental Reference Material symposium (BERM 12) is now over: held at Keble College, Oxford, UK, from 7 to 10 July 2009 it was, based on the feedback received, a resounding success, both scientifically and socially. The weather was perfect and the setting magnificent.

Before looking at the UK Meeting highlights it is important to put BERM into context: it is the original Symposium looking at Biological and Environmental Reference Materials. The first meeting, then known as “BRM” was organised by Dr Wayne Wolf and held in Philadelphia, USA, in September 1983: 26 years ago! Then 25 people shared 16 presentations. Indeed, back then the idea of the application of sound chemical metrology principles to biological matrices was somewhat novel.

Starna Scientific is offering pharmaceutical quality assurance laboratories a safe-to-handle toluene/methanol CRM for validating instrument resolution with derivative spectrophotometry analysis methods. The easy-to-use CRM offers safety benefits for users because the methanol is permanently heat-fuse sealed, ensuring that laboratory users no longer need to handle the volatile, flammable, toxic solvent. The CRM is suitable for pharmaceutical QA laboratories using derivative spectrophotometry procedures to validate instrument resolution following the guidelines specified in section 2.2.25 of the European Pharmacopoeia.

Starna Scientific Issue: 21/05 RSN: 108 More information via

Agilent Technologies has announced their new Complex Proteomics Standard, created to help researchers with protein biomarker discovery by validating mass spectrometry-based workflows for protein identification. It is applicable to a wide range of LC/MS- based applications and can be used with the Agilent 1200 series LC and 6000 series MS systems as well as MS instruments from other suppliers. The standard contains more than 1500 proteins covering a wide range of protein sizes/molecular weights, pI and hydrophobicity. Genetic distance between Pyrococcus furiosus and human—or other organisms typically subjected to proteomic studies—helps avoid erroneous protein identification.

Agilent Technologies Europe Issue: 21/05 RSN: 116 More information via

Isotopically-labelled non-radioactive peptides function as critical internal standards for protein quantitation experiments in MS and NMR experiments. Thermo Fisher Scientific now offers multiple grates of heavy peptides, enabling researchers to match the precision and cost of the internal standard according the assay development stage. The new HeavyPeptide Aqua Ultimate kit is designed for absolute quantification and the Aqua Quant Pro kit is a more affordable alternative when ultimate precision is not necessary.

Thermo Fisher Scientific Issue: 21/05 RSN: 115 More information via

With high diffuse reflectance values, Labsphere's Spectralon Reflectance Standards provide accurate calibration for a variety of testing equipment. Spectrophotometers, densitometers, integrating sphere systems, optical equipment, photographic equipment, reflectometers and remote sensing instruments can be calibrated according to NIST traceable standards. Available in a variety of reflectance values and colours, with values ranging from 2% to 99% reflectance values over the 250–2500 nm range, the diffuseness of the standards eliminate viewing angle errors. The standards come both calibrated and uncalibrated and are available individually and as sets. The units are thermally stable, washable and waterproof for use in a wide variety of environments from laboratory to production and quality control.

Labsphere Inc Issue: 21/02 RSN: 154

The US Pharmacopeial Convention has announced the release of its first certified reference material, dextromethorphan hydrobromide. This release provides pharmaceutical manufacturers with a new class of reference standard that ensures improved information for measurement of their products when meeting requirements set forth in the US Pharmacopeia–National Formulary. Each CRM comes with a Certificate of Analysis containing data on certified property value, uncertainty value and an expiry date, all of which aim to produce a higher level of trueness and traceability in the measurement of product and ingredient specifications.

Issue: 21/01 RSN: 109

Peter J. Jenksthe Jenks Partnership, Newhaven House, Junction Road, Alderbury, Salisbury, Wiltshire SP5 3AZ, UK. E-mail: peter@jenks.info

At the beginning of October 2008 I took part in an International Symposium on Pharmaceutical Reference Standards, organised by the European Directorate for the Quality of Medicines & HealthCare (EDQM) and held between 9 and 10 October 2008 in Strasbourg, France. For those interested, the proceedings can be found on the EDQM Website (http://www.edqm.eu/site/Download-527.html). They are a number of pdf files towards the bottom of the very long page...

LGC has introduced a set of low sulphur certified reference materials to meet the needs of fuel testing laboratories when the new limits of 10 mg kg–1 sulphur in fuel come into force on 1 January 2009. These CRMs have been produced for use by laboratories to develop and validate reliable analyical methods to measure sulphur in fuels at these increasingly low levels. Of particular value to organisations in meeting the requirements will be the CRMs containing 8 mg kg–1 and 20 mg kg–1 in petrol and 10 mg kg–1 sulphur in diesel.LGCIssue: 20/06 RSN:

Christopher BurgessBurgess Analytical Consultancy Limited, “Rose Rae”, The Lendings, Startforth, Barnard Castle, Co. Durham DL12 9AB, UKJohn HammondStarna Scientific Ltd, 52–54 Fowler Road, Hainault Business Park, Hainault, Essex IG6 3UT, UK

Spectroscopy and spectrometry have been around for a long time. In the “modern” era, spectroscopic instruments have been with us in one form or another for over 70 years. This is particularly true for those old “workhorse” techniques, UV-visible and infrared. So by now it might be reasonable to think that we would enjoy a standardisation and calibration environment that would make the assurance of our spectral data quality a matter of routine. Perhaps or perhaps not! Nothing stands still in the application of analytical science to assuring quality. As the column title rightly suggests Quality does Matter.

The rate of change of instrumentation and its application base accelerated during the 1980s with the availability of substantial data processing power and new technologies being incorporated into the humble spectrometer. Suddenly some of the reference materials we relied upon for qualifying and calibrating our spectrometers were no longer “fit for purpose”. Not only were end users in the laboratory faced with these issues but also the instrument manufacturers. At the same time as these technological changes were occurring so too were regulators. Regulatory bodies in a variety of fields, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, environmental, food to name but a few were becoming increasingly interested in the quality of the data coming from our laboratories to ensure compliance with national and international standards.

When discussing the need and role of standards, we need to consider the major changes that have taken place over the last 50 years in four key areas: The National Metrology Institutes (NMIs), the instrument manufacturers, the user base and the globalisation of regulation through international regulatory bodies.

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To simplify the operational qualification of micro-plate readers, Starna has released a new Reference Cell Micro-plate Adaptor that enables laboratory professionals to use existing sealed-cell and filter reference materials in a horizontal format. The design of the adaptor allows the location of eight “pairs” of read position and minimises the potential for bubble interference adversely impacting measurements. The adaptor enables companies to extend their NIST traceable and ISO 17025/ISO Guide 34 accredited certified reference materials for use in a micro-plate format. The device is suitable for quality assurance requirements in pharmaceutical and clinical research applications where new drug compounds and candidates are being screened using automated systems that require formal qualification using appropriate certified reference materials. Using the new adaptor now offers researchers the ability to use existing reference values and compare micro-plate reader data against measurements performed on a conventional spectrometer.Starna ScientificIssue: 20/05 RSN: