2LabsToGo-Recipe for Building Your Own Chromatography Equipment Including Biological Assay and Effect Detection

A complete recipe for building your own chromatog-raphy 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 x 31 cm x 34 cm), 10 times lighter (6.8 kg), and 55 times less expensive (euro 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.

Automated summary

This article introduces a complete recipe for building chromatography equipment using readily available materials. It combines sample separation in the chemistry laboratory with biological effect detection in the biology laboratory. The newly developed 2LabsToGo system is solvent-resistant and environmentally friendly, while also being more compact, lighter, and less expensive than current commercial devices. The system was successfully used to analyze the quality of different water samples and demonstrated its potential for various analytical tasks and applications.