The ion chromatography (IC) application presented in this blog post was the result of a mercury poisoning cluster in the United States in which multiple people in the state of Iowa became ill as a result of taking herbal medicines from India, The researchers dealing with the poisoning contacted our researchers to not only identify the mercury species but also help solve a real whodunit piece.
After going over the case, researchers in our Sunnyvale Applications Lab combined two analytical techniques IC and total multi-elemental analysis by Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectroscopy (ICP-MS) to solve the whodunit! The reason the researchers added the ICP-MS technique to the method is because IC is too specific to conduct a multi-element screening for an unknown contamination.