A complete recipe
for building your own chromatography equipment
from readily available materials is introduced. It combines sample
separation (chemistry laboratory) with biological effect detection
(biology laboratory). This hyphenation of two disciplines is necessary
for prioritizing important compounds in complex samples. Among the
thousands of compounds therein, it is often not clear which compounds
are the important ones. On the same separation surface, additional
detection of biological effects enables and guides substance prioritization.
The newly developed open-source 2LabsToGo system for chemical and
biological analysis is completely solvent-resistant and, due to miniaturization,
environmentally friendly regarding the consumption of materials. It
produces comparable results but is 10 times more compact (26 cm ×
31 cm × 34 cm), 10 times lighter (6.8 kg), and 55 times less
expensive (€ 1717) than current sophisticated commercial devices.
As a proof of concept of the first 2LabsToGo system, the quality of
different water samples was analyzed since clean water is becoming
increasingly rare. In water, most of the thousands of substance signals
or features can neither be identified nor classified toxicologically.
However, methods that exploit this hyphenated strategy provide answers
to such essential safety issues. Drinking or tap water did not show
bioactive or toxic compounds, which was expected, whereas biogas or
landfill water samples did. The hyphenated 2LabsToGo strategy is affordable
and extremely useful for all laboratories with limited equipment but
pressing challenges. It is ready to be used in various analytical
tasks and applications.