Pickering Laboratories exhibited at the North American Chemical Residue Workshop (NACRW) in Naples, Florida on July 22-25, 2018. Formerly the Florida Pesticide Residue Workshop, this annual event is focused on trace level analysis of pesticides, veterinary drug residues and other chemicals found in food, animal feed, cannabis and environmental samples. 

Unique to NACRW are the technical sessions, as they are informal and collaborative to encourage conversation and sharing among the conferees. It’s an exciting workshop where every year attendees come away with insightful new information and presenters can get great feedback on their own research.  Sareeta Nerkar had exactly this opportunity at her oral presentation of “Mycotoxins in Animal Matrices, Food and Feed” which was well received. There is considerable interest in Pickering’s method for mycotoxins analysis because it is robust, established and economical.  Additionally, Sareeta presented our poster “Analysis of Polyether Antibiotics in Animal Feeds by HPLC with Post-Column Derivatization” during the poster session.

As a member of the NACRW organizing committee, Sareeta chaired the social committee this year. She’s pictured here at the Mediterranean-themed dinner event featuring drinks, games and prizes!

The west coast of Florida was experiencing an unusually long red tide event while the workshop was in session. The hotel was about a mile inland, so the health effects were not experienced by the hotel guests although they present a challenge for local residents and beachside visitors. There were some, though, who appreciated the event on a different level! After a presentation on brevetoxins, an attending graduate student related that he took the hotel shuttle to beach in order to experience his first red tide event. It was so strong that it made his eyes tear and caused coughing – he was thrilled. Other attendees perhaps made less use of the beach shuttle this year than at previous workshops.

At our exhibit, Mike Gottschalk offered literature on several post-column environmental testing applications including Glyphosate, Gluphosinate, Carbamates, Mycotoxins and others. Mike and Sareeta hosted a raffle for an Amazon Kindle this year, and we want to congratulate Thomas Scott from Diversified Laboratories on his winning entry!

Our exhibit also included the Pickering Test Solutions product line for consumer product testing. We are excited by how much interest there is in artificial body fluids from laboratories needing standardized solutions for their industry testing requirements.

For us, the workshop was a great success. We hope you enjoyed attending as well! We are already looking ahead to next year’s workshop, when we will have more exciting research to share.

Please visit www.pickeringlabs.com in the meantime for our latest product offerings and updates.