By Anthony Fontana Ph.D., Lab Director

I attended the AOAC Annual Meeting & Exposition held from August 26th to 30th at the Marriott in New Orleans, Louisiana. The meeting encompassed a wide range of topics on botanical and dietary supplement testing. There were excellent sessions on Botanical Ingredients and Dietary Supplement Integrity (BIDSI), Mushrooms, Botanical Reference Materials, Natural Colors, and Probiotics to name a few. It was a great time to catch up with colleagues, old friends, and to make new connections with industry experts.

On Sunday August 27th at a new session titled, ‘Tales from the Bench: Method Challenges and Solutions in Dietary Supplement Analysis’, I presented a talk on using control charts for establishing method measurement uncertainty. Each of us speaking in the session discussed the different challenges that analytical laboratories face and how they are resolved. I want to thank John Travis, NSF International, and Naren Meruva, Waters Corporation, for inviting me to present and setting up this well-received technical session.

On Monday August 28th, Herbalife and Alkemist Labs presented a poster titled; ‘Characterization of Spearmint and Peppermint Leaf Material Using High-Performance Thin Layer Chromatography and Targeted-Amplicon Next Generation Sequencing’. The poster describes an orthogonal approach using HPTLC and targeted amplicon DNA analysis to characterize closely related species of mint samples. Both analyses provide confident differentiation between spearmint and peppermint samples.

Finally, I attended the Technical Division for Reference Materials (TDRM) session where they announced that our own Sidney Sudberg is the Chair Elect for the TDRM Committee. Congratulations Sid, I know you will do a great job in promoting the development and use of reference materials especially for botanicals.