So, if you are like our lab and use HPLC technology, then you know there is an acetonitrile shortage.  Acetonitrile is a by produce of the automative industry.  As you may have heard, this industry is in free fall and as a result acetonitrile has increased in price 6 to 8 fold and normally can’t be bought.  This is a problem becuase acetonitrile is the solvent of choice for most HPLC applications.  Thus, one can think of HPLC’s as running on acetonitrile.

Luckily, I work in an academic environment so I can change solvents.  Others who need to work with certified methods are stuck and can try to save acetonitrile usage by switching to smaller columns.  If you are going to change solvents, there are two major things to consider.  The first is that other solvents like methanol absorve in the UV spectrum which can pose a problem for UV/VIS detectors.  The second is that methanol has a slightly different polarity than acetonitrile and also results in higher backpressure.  Luckily, Thermo has posted an excellent user guide for replacing acetonitrile with other solvents. Today we are going to try to replace our PAH HPLC method that is acetonitrile based with a methanol based method. PAHs are detected using a fluorescence detector so the UV absorbance of methanol is not a big concern.  Hopefully it will go well and tommorrow I can post the results in case others need to change their PAH methods over.

It is funny that as scientists we normally don’t primarily think of ourselves as consumers and thus are somewhat disconnected from the overall economy.  The acetonitrile shortage is a good example of how interconnected our economy actually is.