This third installment of How Dirty Are You? is all about gloves. Outside of solvent compatibility, there is a lot of room for personal preference regarding the type of lab gloves people can use.
I found 5 different gloves in our lab. The bright green gloves and yellow gloves are the two types most often used by my lab mates. I use the bright green gloves. I work with QuEChERS extracts all the time so I was most interested in background resulting from gloves contacting acetonitrile. I have already investigated the bright green gloves when I was tracking down some peaks in my process blank for a QuEChERS experiment. I was seeing some repeating peaks which were identified as alkanes via GC-TOFMS. Through some further investigation, I was able to confirm that these alkane peaks were from my favorite bright green gloves. That got me thinking about contamination peaks from other gloves…
What We Did
We tested the background generated by the 5 glove types found in our lab by soaking a small piece of glove in 1 mL of acetonitrile for 30 minutes. The samples were tested via GC-TOFMS after the 30 minutes. For relative intensity, a dashed line at the peak height of a 2 ppm PAH standard is drawn on the chromatograms. But you will not see the results until my next blog!
Questions
1. Which gloves (see below) gave the worst background?
- Bright Green Gloves
- Baby Blue Gloves
- Yellow latex Gloves
- Green Gloves
- Royal Blue Gloves
2. What common additive was found in multiple gloves tested?
- Dyes
- Antioxidants
- UV Stabilizers
