Running Water Equals a Running Lab: Having fail-safes in place to ensure consistent high-quality water is crucial for productive laboratories

摘要

Conducting any research in the lab will invariably necessitate the use of water in a number of different formats, from the buffer on your bench to the sample in your chromatography column. Because of this diversity of uses, it's important that your water is always fit for purpose and of the right quality. For example, while preparation of stock solutions with regular distilled water will typically be robust enough, high-end applications, such as mass spectrometry, require a much higher level of purity. It is therefore unsurprising that water purification systems are a vital tool in many life science laboratories, even extending to those carrying out research in chemistry and physics. Ion exchange (IX) has become a popular and powerful approach to water purification, exchanging contaminating ionized species present in the water with harmless ones to create a highly pure product.