SteveL
New member
Randy:
Enjoyed your Reefkeeping article on organic copounds in our reef tanks. Couldn't agree with you more that it's the big chemical unknown that all our tanks are exposed to be we're all essentially blind to what is going on.
I believe there are several strategies to investigating how and what organics are turned over in our aquaria but it's going to need some pretty heavy analytcal instrumentation horsepower. We spoke briefly at MACNA about using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (my own profession) but nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) could probably also play an important role.
I spoke with Bob Minard (co designer and curator of the Penn State reef tank with Sanjay Joshi) along a similar theme. Bob is a mass spec guy also. I don't know if there's any other LC/MS or NMR guys reading these boards in the US or elsewhere but here's a bone for someone to pick up on in terms of a strategy.
Consistent with your article, we're undoubtedly facing a complex mixture of organics in our tanks. The fact that most are closed systems differentiates them from the ocean (and the fact we have no where near the biodiversity - so much so that we can hardly even use that term) means that we probably have very unnatural accumulations of organics unless our skimmers and mechanical media are stripping everying out ... which I doubt. So if we're going to set about identifying and quantifying various organics we need a means of separating the "soup". State of the art here for the polar organics we can expect in an aqueous media (i.e. our saltwater) is liquid chromatography (LC). This is a technique where a sample is separated into ideally all it's individual components such that they elute from the end of a column (think narrow tube). On the end of this column we have a detector and I'm proposing that this is a mass spectrometer (MS) for our interests and needs of identification and quantitation.
MS identifies a given compound according to its molecular weight and how the structure "fragments" in the instrument. By combining LC and MS we are able to look at the complex mixtures which we can expect in our aquaria.
If we were to establish a standard LC/MS protocol (which would include an extraction of a saltwater sample prior to the LC/MS) we could start to do some comparisons of say:
1. A simple control system vrs one with a skimmer
2. A control vrs use of carbon
3. A control vrs a system with fighting corals
etc etc
By doing a compare and contrast an LC/MS experiment could focus on those compounds that differ between say a skimmed tank versus an unskimmed tank. In the initial stages just getting an "LC/MS fingerprint" would be interesting to see if we can detect the differences when we attempt to remove organics.
Woud like to hear your thoughts, Bob Minards or any other organic analytical chemists opinions on this one. I'll also attempt to tackle LC/MS questions if this thread generates interest.
In the meantime I will be trying to do some "weekend work" over the winter to investigate these ideas.
SteveL
Enjoyed your Reefkeeping article on organic copounds in our reef tanks. Couldn't agree with you more that it's the big chemical unknown that all our tanks are exposed to be we're all essentially blind to what is going on.
I believe there are several strategies to investigating how and what organics are turned over in our aquaria but it's going to need some pretty heavy analytcal instrumentation horsepower. We spoke briefly at MACNA about using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (my own profession) but nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) could probably also play an important role.
I spoke with Bob Minard (co designer and curator of the Penn State reef tank with Sanjay Joshi) along a similar theme. Bob is a mass spec guy also. I don't know if there's any other LC/MS or NMR guys reading these boards in the US or elsewhere but here's a bone for someone to pick up on in terms of a strategy.
Consistent with your article, we're undoubtedly facing a complex mixture of organics in our tanks. The fact that most are closed systems differentiates them from the ocean (and the fact we have no where near the biodiversity - so much so that we can hardly even use that term) means that we probably have very unnatural accumulations of organics unless our skimmers and mechanical media are stripping everying out ... which I doubt. So if we're going to set about identifying and quantifying various organics we need a means of separating the "soup". State of the art here for the polar organics we can expect in an aqueous media (i.e. our saltwater) is liquid chromatography (LC). This is a technique where a sample is separated into ideally all it's individual components such that they elute from the end of a column (think narrow tube). On the end of this column we have a detector and I'm proposing that this is a mass spectrometer (MS) for our interests and needs of identification and quantitation.
MS identifies a given compound according to its molecular weight and how the structure "fragments" in the instrument. By combining LC and MS we are able to look at the complex mixtures which we can expect in our aquaria.
If we were to establish a standard LC/MS protocol (which would include an extraction of a saltwater sample prior to the LC/MS) we could start to do some comparisons of say:
1. A simple control system vrs one with a skimmer
2. A control vrs use of carbon
3. A control vrs a system with fighting corals
etc etc
By doing a compare and contrast an LC/MS experiment could focus on those compounds that differ between say a skimmed tank versus an unskimmed tank. In the initial stages just getting an "LC/MS fingerprint" would be interesting to see if we can detect the differences when we attempt to remove organics.
Woud like to hear your thoughts, Bob Minards or any other organic analytical chemists opinions on this one. I'll also attempt to tackle LC/MS questions if this thread generates interest.
In the meantime I will be trying to do some "weekend work" over the winter to investigate these ideas.
SteveL
