At the ASMS annual conference, much of the spotlight falls on mass spectrometry: higher sensitivity, faster acquisition, and broader analytical reach. However, Crystal Holt, Sr. Director, Global Marketing and GC Business Unit Manager at Phenomenex, sees a wider challenge across the full workflow.
As MS systems detect more compounds at lower levels, laboratories need chromatography, sample preparation, and consumables that can support faster, cleaner, and more reliable analysis. “Growth opportunities vary considerably across sectors and are highly dependent on the specific industry,” Holt notes.
In pharma and biopharma, she points to oligonucleotides as one of the most active areas. Many laboratories, she observes, are moving from traditional length to longer oligonucleotides, creating unique challenges and driving demand for improved separation strategies.
Oligos, Omics, and PFAS Shape Method Development
For the ASMS audience, Holt sees biopharma and life science research as key areas of momentum. Peptides, oligonucleotides, and broader omics workflows continue to create new analytical needs, while genomics, proteomics, lipidomics, and metabolomics increasingly overlap.
Working in analytical science?
Register for a FREE Separation Science account to subscribe to the Separation Science Newsletter.
Clinical research also continues to expand, with new biomarkers and discovery work bridging research and applied markets. Outside the main ASMS focus, Holt sees strong activity in environmental testing. “PFAS continues to be an area of focus for a lot of our customers,” she adds.
Across these applications, the challenge stays consistent: scientists need methods that resolve difficult analytes, handle challenging matrices, and generate reproducible results during growing throughput demands.
Throughput Without Interruption
As instruments become faster and more sensitive, labs need to use them more efficiently. Holt sees this as one of the clearest pressures on chromatography. “One of the challenges that we’ve seen is maximizing instrumentation use,” she notes. That means running instrumentations faster and achieving higher throughput.
For many labs, the goal is sustained performance. Holt describes the need as “throughput without interruption”: the ability to move through workflows without repeated system troubleshooting or unplanned consumable changes.
Samples are increasingly precious, and the data they generate is often used to make critical decisions, making workflow reliability essential to preserving analytical value. That need carries practical implications. A lab may want to run samples over long periods of time, but the system can only do that if solvents, columns, and consumables last for the full analysis time. A single compromised method component can halt the analysis and shift the lab from data generation to troubleshooting.
Column Hardware Enters the Conversation
Holt sees column hardware as an underexplored route to workflow improvement. Historically, many LC column advances have focused on media, particles, and surface chemistry. Those areas still matter, but they do not address every source of failure. “I think that hardware development has been underserved as an industry,” Holt says.
Phenomenex’s recent column hardware launch reflects that focus. Rather than changing the chemistry, the design targets matrix fouling and matrix-related column failure. “The great thing about it is because the selectivity and chemistry are the same, analysts don’t need to do any method development to see benefit from the new hardware,” Holt notes.
That point is important for labs that cannot afford major method redevelopment. If they can improve column lifetime while keeping the same selectivity, they can address a workflow bottleneck without rebuilding the assay.
Matrix Effects Drive Column Failure
For Holt, the central challenge is not the ideal separation. It is the real sample. “Most of what makes a column fail is matrix impacts,” she notes. Dirty samples, residual phospholipids, salts, proteins, and other contaminants can enter the column, contributing to clogging, increased back pressure, and erosion of peak resolution. Cleaner sample preparation helps, but it cannot remove every interfering compound.
“You’re never going to be able to remove every phospholipid, every peptide, every protein, every salt,” Holt says. “What you want to do is minimize the impact that those matrix effects will have on your chromatography and the longevity of your column chemistries.”
The value of longer column life depends on the lab. Production environments may need more injections with fewer staff interventions. Core labs may need robust performance on walk-up systems where many users run different samples. In each case, chromatography supports more than separation. It protects workflow continuity.
Sensitivity Raises the Bar for Clean Workflows
Higher MS sensitivity also changes expectations for sample preparation and consumables. When instruments detect lower levels, they can also detect background contamination that older systems may have missed.
“As mass spectrometers look for more sensitive analysis at lower levels, your sample preparation also has to be very selective,” Holt notes. “It would pick up things that our mass spectrometers never saw before.”
PFAS analysis illustrates the issue. Laboratories need to measure low levels, but PFAS contamination can come from the environment, consumables, sample preparation products, columns, or system components. That background can create peaks that interfere with the target analytes.
Phenomenex developed its “Designed for PFAS” product line to reduce this risk. Holt frames the goal as helping customers avoid workflow-derived contamination that creates troubleshooting burdens.
Customers Start with the Desired Outcome
Holt also sees a change in how scientists approach suppliers. Customers may need a column, sample preparation product, or consumable, but they rarely start with a product request. “They don’t come looking for a sample prep kit,” she remarks. “They’re searching for a solution to their problem.”
Food, serum, plasma, whole blood, urine, and environmental samples all bring interferences. Scientists must separate the compounds they care about from everything else in the matrix, often at low concentrations and under time pressure.
The problem might involve testing PFAS at a certain level, separating oligonucleotides of a certain length, measuring a biomarker in a specific matrix, or determining critical quality attributes (CQAs). The recommended product needs to support the desired outcome.
As ASMS highlights advances in mass spectrometry, Holt’s perspective points to a practical constraint: the bottleneck may no longer sit inside the mass spectrometer. Increasingly, it lies in the steps that feed it.
