Pickering Laboratories continues keeping an eye on Glyphosate situation around the globe. It has been announced that China is set to introduce Maximum Residue Limits for all imported final foods and raw material at 200 ppb or lower of Glyphosate by the end of 2019. These requirements would include all the grains, soybeans and other legumes. Right now China has no Maximum Residue Limits for Glyphosate so setting such low limits is bound to change the way countries importing food to China use this herbicide.
The highest level of contamination is found in crops such as oats and barley that are treated with Glyphosate right before harvest to desiccate the plants. Many countries, including the US, established high Residue Limits for Glyphosate in such crops. For example, US limits for Glyphosate in barley is 30 ppm and in oats is 20 ppm. Introducing limits at 200 ppb would most likely cause a decrease the use of Glyphosate as a desiccant and should increase testing. In fact, Australia, one of the biggest importers of food to China is considering banning the use of Glyphosate as a desiccant.
Interestingly, the decrease in Glyphosate use will be affecting China’s chemical production industry since currently China is the largest producer of Glyphosate and exports more than 60% of this chemical. But we certainly hope that tighter limits and increased testing for Glyphosate is be adopted by other countries as well for sake of everybody’s health as well as the health of Pickering business.
Our customers may not know this, but our very own Gloria Garcia plans an amazing holiday party annually for all of Pickering Laboratories’ employees and their guests. This year our celebration was a dinner cruise on the San Francisco Bay!
We cruised out of the Berkeley Marina on a brisk Saturday evening and our vessel was the perfect size for our small but festive group! Commodore Hornblower Cruises did a fabulous job with the party; we were treated to a fun crew and great service! To our delight, it was a perfectly clear evening out on the water! (As you might know, San Francisco tends to have a bit of fog from time to time.)
Here’s a taste of our fantastic views of the Bay Bridge and the beautiful twinkles of the city skyline!
With such an excellent light show out every window, it took some awesome food and a lively DJ to capture our attention inside. Gloria organized several hilarious after-dinner games to keep the crowd entertained, including a hybrid musical-chairs-scavenger-hunt and a modified hot potato game!
Here’s a great photo of Jim Murphy and Judy Pickering (looks like they found some tasty wine)!
Someone captured a live action shot of Gloria and Rebecca (are we on the dance floor?) to share.
We enjoyed a great night of good friends, fun games, dancing and plenty of holiday cheer! It was a fun way to close out 2018 and ring in 2019. We send our thanks to Gloria again for her hard work – we certainly appreciated the excellent results and we hope you enjoyed the pictures.
From all of us at Pickering Labs, we wish you the very best in the New Year!
Chromatography Quiz #30: Aflatoxins Decreased Signal – RESULTS
Pickering Labs would like to congratulate all of our winners for our previous newsletter’s Aflatoxins Chromatography Quiz: Mark Ritari from Anatek Labs, Thomas Scott from Diversified Laboratories, Tom Schneider from Suffolk County Water Authority, Narjes Ghafoori from LA County Environmental Toxicology Lab, Jiufeng Fan from Glaxo Smith Kline, and Ankita Gambhir from KFMC.
Winners will soon receive an Amazon eGift Card, redeemable towards a vast array of items store-wide at Amazon.com. Happy shopping, winners! We wish you cheers and success in the New Year!
Congratulations to our quiz winners!
Thank you all for your submissions!
.
The correct answers for the Aflatoxins quiz:
A decrease in signal could be due to a bad autosampler, old/degraded standard, aged reactor loop, or aged UV lamp in the photochemical reactor.
Identify the error made when running the Glyphosate chromatogram below and win a prize!
Simply email your answer and your full contact information to Rebecca at rlsmith@pickeringlabs.com by April 1, 2019 in order to win. You will receive email confirmation when your submission is received, and the troubleshooting answer and winner congratulations will be published in the next issue (to be anonymous, please notify Rebecca in submission).
Glyphosate Analysis for US EPA Method 547:
Normal Operating Conditions:(for reference only, changes may be reflected in chromatogram)
As most of you know, Pickering Labs is a small company. We all work on a single shift, so pretty much everyone is in the lunch room at the same time each day. That makes for a wide range of conversational topics daily, which are often influenced by the San Jose Mercury newspaper on the table or the contents of the local news the evening before.
When Utah passed their “Free-Range Parenting” law, it made national news back in March. It also made conversation in the Pickering breakroom! We discussed the definition provided for free-range parenting and concluded that here at Pickering we needed more options for defining parenting styles. Enter the new supplemental phrases: cage-free parenting and pasture-raised parenting! Taken from the Humane Farm Animal Care Standards, we decided that a cage-free child was the most closely supervised, followed by a free-range child (allowed some autonomy) and finally a pasture-raised child, which was given the most license to roam. It’s interesting that although most of us considered ourselves to have been pasture-raised in our childhoods, many of the staff employed a more cage-free or free-range style when raising their own children.
As Saji, Anita and Gabriela discussed the pros and cons of degrees of parental supervision (while giving David plenty of advice for raising his 15-month old daughter), I wondered what impact the ‘parenting’ differences had on the hens and their eggs… It was lunchtime after all!
It appears that pasture-raised eggs might have health benefits over commercially-raised eggs, including increased omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin E, vitamin A, and beta carotene. They also have reduced cholesterol and saturated fats, both of which the American Heart Association recommends reducing in your diet to lower your risk of heart disease and stroke. The differences in the eggs come from the chickens’ diet: pasture-raised hens eat grass and bugs in addition to the grain feed given to commercially-raised hens.
So, while we’re talking about the chickens’ diet and lifestyle, what else can contribute to the health and wellbeing of these hens? After additional research, I discovered that poultry farming comes with its own bill of rights! Called the Five Freedoms for Poultry, chickens are raised humanely when their basic needs are met (food, water, safety) but they are also given the freedom to express their natural behaviors and they have rapid access to diagnosis and treatment of injury or disease.
Now I’m onto something! But does a happier chicken make a tastier egg, or just a healthier one? It’s hard to find scientific studies on taste, although you can find loads of data on the differences in composition of meats raised in different ways. Composition impacts how healthy the egg is, but when it comes to its actual taste, apparently the mindset of the person tasting and the color of the egg might have more bearing on perceived taste than anything else, including whether the hen was pasture-raised or conventionally-raised.
Even if taste isn’t a factor, purchasing healthier eggs and meat coming from happier hens can still be a worthwhile grocery shopping practice! Top concerns include the environmental and human health effects of antibiotics use in the production of food, a topic that has gained steam in consumer awareness in more recent years and has been studied for several decades internationally. As the public increases its attention on antibiotics use and antimicrobial resistance, farmers are beginning to make changes to the manner in which antibiotics are used in livestock farming. And for good reason, as their livelihood could face increased pressure from the eventual market introduction of synthetic or lab-grown meats!
In response to consumer concerns regarding food production, moving away from antibiotics use became a top priority for Perdue Foods, one of the biggest poultry producers in the United States. Perdue began the process of raising poultry without antibiotics fifteen years ago, and they have hit a major milestone with 100% of the birds they produced in 2017 raised “No Antibiotics Ever,” meaning that from hatchery through slaughter, the birds are never treated with any antibiotics during their lifetime. If the use of antibiotics become medically necessary for a bird, the animal is treated as needed but removed from Perdue Foods branded production. All human and animal antibiotics have been removed from the feed and hatchery, and animals are raised in a way that does not require antibiotics for disease prevention.
In fact, remember the Five Freedoms of Poultry? Perdue continues to improve their implementation of the Animal Care Initiative, adding windows and enrichments to encourage bird activity. Says Mike Leventini, manager of live production activities at Perdue Foods: “We believe an active chicken is a healthy chicken, it simply goes hand in hand.” An impressive philosophy to implement for a company that processes 13 million birds per week from over 2,100 farms around the United States!
Most recently, our R&D team released a fast and sensitive method for the analysis of fumonisins in grains and feeds, which is particularly of interest due to the health problems caused in horses and swine. You might remember our contaminated feed concerns from a previous newsletter article which discussed the risks of mycotoxins to livestock.
Chromatography Quiz #28: 35th Anniversary Word Puzzle – Results
Pickering Labs would like to congratulate all of our winners for our previous newsletter’s 35th Anniversary Word Puzzle: Jim Balk from Nebraska DHHS Public Health Environmental Laboratory, Tom Schneider from Suffolk County Water Authority, Karissa Scroggins from North Coast Laboratories, Narjes Ghafoori from LA County Environmental Toxicology Lab, Joy Gottlieb from New Mexico Department of Health Scientific Lab Division, Hossein Hajipour from Texas Dept. of State Health Services Laboratories, and Widchuda Meeim from Thailand Bureau of Quality Control of Livestock Products.
Winners will soon receive a Packing Organizer Set from the Container Store! This colorful set of 6 packing cubes are durable and clearly labeled to help you organize your suitcase! Just in time as you plan for those summer getaways!
Congratulations to our quiz winners and happy packing!
Thank you all for your submissions!
The correct answers for the Anniversary Word Puzzle are as follows:
Simply email your answer as well as your full contact information to Rebecca at rlsmith@pickeringlabs.com by July 15, 2018 in order to win. You will receive email confirmation that your submission has been received. The answer to the quiz and winner congratulations will be published in the next issue (to be anonymous, please notify Rebecca in submission).
Maroon: Good chromatogram
Blue: Elevated baseline
What could be contributing to the elevated baseline?
Four years into our 40-year marriage, I can recall Michael saying “I know I can improve amino acid analysis” with such enthusiasm it could only mean big things. He’d finished up his second post-doc and was working in industry – a startling contrast, to be sure, but moving every year was increasingly difficult with our growing family. So, we settled in the Bay Area permanently and he started first with Durham Instruments and then worked for Spectra Physics. At the time, amino acid analysis was taking chemists on the order of 12 hours per run! Reducing the run time to three hours was only the first of many developments Michael had up his sleeve.
Within the year, Michael left his job to start Pickering Laboratories with our flagship product: Trione®, our ninhydrin reagent. The first bottles were sent out to industry experts for evaluation, and became our ambassadors carrying with them our hope of building a successful business. I remember it was important to Michael for the bottles of Trione® to ship upright, because he thought of them as little soldiers marching off to the marketplace to do the job of defending his reputation and building our brand.
The early days of the business were challenging. Michael did all the phases of production, taking orders as well as all of the manufacturing, packaging and shipping. He even “hired” our two older kids to wash the bottles sometimes. I was working in corporate marketing at the time, so I would attend trade shows and help Michael network with potential customers. We didn’t want people to know we were such a small company, so I used my maiden name to give the appearance I was an employee instead of his wife!
When Michael would talk to chemists about Trione®, they would get so excited about this breakthrough reagent for amino acids analysis. We were always grateful so many people offered their advice and counsel just to help the enterprise along. It was rough-and-tumble for the first year or two, and every encouraging word helped keep us going.
Customer orders began building momentum, and Michael and I breathed a sigh of relief! Michael hired an additional 3-4 people on staff and I quit my job to help with administrative duties and expanding our marketing efforts. He determined there was demand for a post-column derivatization instrument, and the PCX5000 was born. Our earliest foray into instrumentation came as a benchtop kit, with standalone components including a pump, mixing system and reactor. Michael initially didn’t want Pickering Labs to be an instrument company, but we found that the instruments were needed to support the sale of our Trione® reagent and also the growing family of buffers we were selling.
Michael’s reputation for post-column expertise began gaining attention from other chemists whose applications were post-column but not amino acid analysis. As a result, Michael began to explore these other industries’ post-column needs. And when he developed Pickering’s OPA-reagent-based products for analysis of Carbamates and Glyphosate, he entered into the world of environmental testing and began working with EPA methods. Chemists who had previously been making their own eluents by following the EPA methods could now buy Michael’s ready-to-use buffers and purified reagents instead. And they kept reordering because of the quality and reproducibility that Michael’s chemistry delivered. He would even say that he would “guarantee the chromatogram” to any chemist using his products, which was unprecedented.
With the administrative/office duties securely staffed and the business looking more and more like a successful enterprise, I stepped back into a part-time role and focused on marketing. As our family expanded, my time also became more occupied at home (our two youngest daughters were born in the mid-80’s). By the end of the eighties, Michael was ready to hire additional staff to manage the business so he could really focus on his true passion: research and product development.
In fact, as I think about that time, the early nineties are when the company really started to take shape in its modern form. Michael added then-Operations-Manager Jim Murphy to manage the business in 1991 (Jim is our current President) and shifted fully into a technical role. They also hired a full-time marketing manager, and so I went to work soon thereafter for the Palo Alto school district.
Michael and his team evolved the PCX5000 standalone kit into the PCX3100 and PCX5100, our first fully-integrated post-column derivatization instruments. Michael also developed more post-column applications with the collaboration of EPA, FDA, AOAC and CDFA, all of which further expanded our chemistries and columns offered. Which in turn cemented our customer base and reputation for making the post-column instruments. The business experienced steady growth, and the PCX3100 and PCX5100 sold well and supported our chemistry sales exactly as we’d envisioned.
Pickering Labs celebrating its 35th anniversary is a wonderful chance for me to reflect on working so closely with Michael during the first ten years of the business. And I’d like to use our newsletter as an opportunity to introduce myself, or reintroduce myself to our long-time customers. After my retirement from the school district, I began getting involved in the business again and joined the Board of Directors in 2014. My work with the Pickering team behind the scenes isn’t very visibile to our customers, but I hope this gives us an opportunity to remember Michael together and that you enjoy my fond recollections (and new perspective?) of how Pickering Labs began.
Pickering Labs Celebrates Our 35th Anniversary with 1980’s Pictures!!!
Anita and Severo are Respectively Our Packaging and Shipping/Receiving Experts!
Jim is Pictured here (Long Before His Cleanshaven Days As Our Current President)!
Gabriela and Jay are Both Production Chemists and Manufacture the Bulk of Our Reagents and Eluents!
David and Maria are Both Chemists, He’s Tech Support and She Heads Up R&D!
Saji, our QC Manager, is Pictured here on Her Wedding Day in 1982. She and George have been Married 35 Years!!
Sareeta is a Research Chemist and Rebecca Manages Operations.
Mike, Seen here with Bride Martha, is Our Marketing Manager.
Judy Pickering, Owner, Pictured here with Our Founder Michael.
Gloria is an Administrator and Our Longest Tenured Employee at 26 Years! Anthony is Our Newest Team Member – Working in Manufacturing for About a Year.
Tony (Middle) is Our Production Manager and Still Rocks That Same ‘stache…Looks Like It’s Genetic!
Fidel and Craig Both Work in Our Manufacturing Department, Building Vectors and Packing Analytical Columns! On the Right is Another Picture of Craig (Hey Jim, Down in Front!).
They Couldn’t Get Us Actual Pictures From the 80s, but They Did Pose for Some Awesome 80s Themed Photos! Ed Works in Manufacturing Building Pinnacles and Diana Handles Order Entry and Accounts Payable.
Thank you to our entire team for participating in this awesome project! We hope you enjoyed our anniversary flashback party!!
Thank you for being our customer and we hope you enjoy these fantastic photos. Our employees had a lot of fun digging through their old scrapbooks to help create this blast from the past!
Guaranteed Chemistry
GDPR Notice
We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. By clicking “Accept”, you consent to the use of ALL the cookies.
Do not sell my personal information.Please note that you can always revisit and manage your cookie consent by clicking on a link found on our Privacy Policy page.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously.
Cookie
Duration
Description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-advertisement
1 year
Set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin, this cookie is used to record the user consent for the cookies in the "Advertisement" category .
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional
11 months
The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
viewed_cookie_policy
11 months
The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.
zenid
session
This cookie is required for the shopping cart login.
Functional cookies help to perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collect feedbacks, and other third-party features.
Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.
Cookie
Duration
Description
__utma
2 years
This cookie is set by Google Analytics and is used to distinguish users and sessions. The cookie is created when the JavaScript library executes and there are no existing __utma cookies. The cookie is updated every time data is sent to Google Analytics.
__utmb
30 minutes
Google Analytics sets this cookie, to determine new sessions/visits. __utmb cookie is created when the JavaScript library executes and there are no existing __utma cookies. It is updated every time data is sent to Google Analytics.
__utmc
session
The cookie is set by Google Analytics and is deleted when the user closes the browser. It is used to enable interoperability with urchin.js, which is an older version of Google Analytics and is used in conjunction with the __utmb cookie to determine new sessions/visits.
__utmt
10 minutes
Google Analytics sets this cookie to inhibit request rate.
__utmz
6 months
Google Analytics sets this cookie to store the traffic source or campaign by which the visitor reached the site.
Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.
Cookie
Duration
Description
calltrk_session_id
1 year
This cookie is set by the Provider CallRail. This cookie is used for storing an unique identifier for a user browser session. It is used for tracking the number of phone calls generate from the website.
Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads.
Other uncategorized cookies are those that are being analyzed and have not been classified into a category as yet.
Cookie
Duration
Description
calltrk_landing
6 minutes
This is a functionality cookie set by the CallRail. This cookie is used to store the landing page URL. It helps to accurately attribute the visitor source when displaying a tracking phone number.
calltrk_referrer
6 minutes
This is a functionality cookie set by the CallRail. This cookie is used to store the referring URL. It helps to accurately attribute the visitor source when displaying a tracking phone number.