Emerging Investigators Special Issue

Analytical science continues to expand in importance in our daily lives. The driving forces in this expansion come from government for regulatory purposes, from industry for monitoring production processes, from the public in general through greater understanding of our impact on our world and from the scientific community through their creation of new materials and analytes of interest. Coupled with this expansion are the analytical challenges of creating more efficient and reliable ways of performing determinations of analytes that have been monitored for a long time, as well as new types of samples and completely new classes of analytes.

While new analytical approaches are quite often challenging to develop, it is also just as time consuming to decide which of these approaches will be of a wide and diverse interest to chemists and scientists in other disciplines. One approach to making such a decision is to follow the lead of our field's emerging investigators. In this third instalment of the special issues in The Analyst on Emerging Investigators in Analytical Science a selection of most promising investigators in our community provide some insight into the direction of analytical chemistry.

Prevalent in the first two special issues on Emerging Investigators was the rise of bioanalytical chemistry. Bioanalytical chemistry also dominates this issue but what is also striking is the confluence of bioanalytical measurements with micro and nanotechnologies. In this issue, applications of microscale technology are represented in a number of papers. Sabine Szunerits and colleagues from Grenoble in France demonstrate the use of scanning electrochemical microscopy to selectively deposit micrometre size features of DNA onto gold surfaces at defined locations and use these surfaces for the electrochemical detection of DNA hybridisation. Lab-on-a-chip type devices are presented for the separation of fluorescently labelled amino acids (Culbertson and co-workers), for on-chip flow analysis with electrochemical detection of cysteine and homocysteine (Martin and co-workers) and chip-based capillary electrophoresis with electrochemical detection for the analysis of phenolic pollutants (Garcia and colleague). Small scale separations are also presented by Hilder and co-workers using capillary ion-chromatography for inorganic anion separation where novel latex coated monolithic polymers are used as the stationary phase; whilst capillary electrophoresis is used to detect nitric oxide metabolites (Shippy and colleagues).

The impact nanotechnology is now having on analytical chemistry is also prevalent in this issue. Using nanoparticles to provide new platforms for biosensing is demonstrated using protein modified core shell semiconducting nanoparticles for the detection of maltose (Benson and co-workers) and using soft nanoparticles, nanoscale vesicles to encapsulate an oxygen sensitive dye, as oxygen sensors (Aspinwall and colleague). Forming nanoscale patterns of proteins on surfaces with a view to producing protein arrays (Garno and co-workers), the development of VideoAFM which enables rapid nanoscale imaging of surfaces (Hobbs et al.), the modification of electrodes with molecular imprinted polymers for detecting theophylline (Minteer and co-workers) and the modification of electrodes with carbon nanotubes for the detection of neurotransmitters (Stevenson and co-workers) are other papers with strong nanotechnology aspects, which demonstrate the broad influence this new field is having on analytical chemistry.

The application of more established instrumental methods in bioanalytical chemistry are also well represented in this issue. Mass spectrometry is employed for the characterization of peptides and proteins in papers using MS/MS and chemometric approaches to determine primary and secondary fragmentation (Desaire and colleague), using electron capture dissociation Fourier Transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry (FT-ICR MS) for exploring proton exchange rates in polypeptides (Håkansson and colleague) using a novel strategy employing a MALDI source with FT-ICR MS to combine analyte ions from differently labelled peptide samples (Li and colleague) and using multistage tandem MS for recombinant protein characterisation (Reid and co-workers). Emerging instrumental methods in bioanalytical chemistry also include using 2-beam fluorescence correlation spectroscopy with electrophoretic analysis of peptides (Weston and colleague), the use of scanning electrochemical microscopy for the imaging of ion-channels in bilayer lipid membranes (Cliffel and co-workers) and the modification of electrodes with DNA for the detection of non-electroactive ions (Yu and co-workers).

Nordon et al. continue to build capacity in the number of analytical techniques available to scientists by describing novel broad band acoustic emission measurements as a means for noninvasively monitoring a heterogeneous esterification reaction.

Collectively, the papers illustrate the need to use advances made in other scientific disciplines. Moreover, these collective works suggest that if the multitude of challenges in analytical science is to be tackled effectively, there exists a need for innovative solutions that are not part of major trends. This is an exciting time for analytical science and this issue showcases just some of the exciting young talents around the world who are meeting the most difficult of analytical challenges. The editors of this special issue would like to thank all the authors for their important contributions to this issue and to analytical science. We look forward greatly to seeing more exciting and important work from them.

J. Justin Gooding

The University of New South Wales

Dana Spence

Wayne State University

---