In order to assess the quality of edible oils and fats and to check their storage properties one often needs a test that determines the stability of the products at short notice and requires a minimum of work. Werner Schneider reports.

Due to the continuing growth of the biopharmaceutical industry, in recent years, there is an increasing demand for large volumes of both powdered and liquid media for production purposes. Alan Baines reports on a new method to manufacture a powdered cell culture media which overcomes many of the disadvantages of previous methods.

The competition to develop new and better chemicals, particularly for pharmaceutical applications, has been assisted by a range of tools that did not exist even three years ago. Dr Jasbir Singh reports.

Dagmar Schwertner looks at the work of the BioGenes Gesellschaft für Biopolymere mbH, which was founded in 1992 by two scientists Dr Alexander Knoll and Dr Sergej Ovodov. The company specialises in the development and production of customised immunoassays, antigens and antibodies for the pharmaceutical and diagnostic industry.

Despite the major advances in the development and acceptance of non-isotopic molecular biology techniques, it is still apparent that radiolabelled chemicals will be needed in the laboratory to obtain the necessary sensitivity required of certain procedures.

Locked nucleic acid (LNA) forms DNA- or RNA-heteroduplexes with exceptional high thermal stability, and has the potential to improve current in vitro DNA diagnostic technologies. Jan Skouv, Nana Jacobsen and Mogens Havsteen Jakobsen report the latest research and what is likely to be the impact on today's and tommorow's technologies.

The latest version Soft Imaging System's image analysing software ­ analySIS 3.1 ­ is now available.

Increasing the speed of sample throughput and the desire to conduct analysis at the point of sampling ­ be it in the field, factory or surgery ­ are two of the major trends driving measurement science today. Helen Parkes and Derek Craston report.

Two critical areas of drug discovery are the development of assays and their subsequent progression to the HTS environment where identification of leads among potential targets generated occurs. Kristian Enkvist reports.

Particulate silica HPLC columns can produce very high pressures and long separation times. In between runs these columns require a lengthy equilibration phase whilst flow rates and column length are limited, writes Dr K Sinz. In summary, particulate columns can seriously limit the number of samples it is possible to analyse.

The field of substitution medicine is rapidly evolving. Substitution medicine is based on an integration of biomaterials as a scaffold, and the culturing of cells, resulting in a novel, tissue engineering approach.

Polymer Laboratories manufactures a new design of high sensitivity evaporative light scattering (ELS) detector for HPLC, microHPLC and GPC/SEC, the PL-ELS 1000. This detector represents the latest generation of non-selective auniversal' detectors.

Edvin N Munk reports on the importance of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) to pharmaceutical industry and the work of The SNP Consortium made up by 13 leading pharmaceutical and information organisations.

Renishaw has expanded its range of Raman spectrographs with the its ultra-violet Raman microscope. This instrument uses ultra-violet laser excitation to produce Raman scattering, rather than the more usual visible laser excitation.

Knowing what your competitors are up to has never been more important. As Sean Ottewell reports, the latest addition to intelligence database technology aims to bring a new level of depth and refinement in the search for information on the opposition. One new package will fully integration of databases, analytical tools and alerting systems.

Work undertaken in Germany is demonstrating how a new particle size measurement technique is opening up many new applications areas in the laboratory. Heike Krischollek reports on the specific problems posed when dealing with biological materials and how one new measurement system has been designed to overcome these difficulties.

International trade fair Analytica 2000, will take place in Münich, Germany, between April 11 and 14. Exhibitors from around the world are expected to present the latest products and services in the fields of modern biology, chemistry, pharmacy, medicine and dietics.

Until recently, direct measurement of LDL cholesterol was not practically possible for most laboratories in a routine clinical setting. The first homogeneous LDL method was introduced in 1997. Here, Mauro Panteghini looks at the clinical significance and advances in measurement of LDL cholesterol.

The acquisition and analysis of sequence data is not an end in itself; rather it is a powerful tool to help understand the complex biology of host-pathogen interactions. It can, as Dr Barbara Gledhill finds out, be used to elucidate gene expression patterns and the relationship between genes by comparative genomics andgene product function on a whole genomic scale.

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