ABSTRACT
Activated carbon is an adsorbent and carrier for reagents in sample preparation for analysis. Purification of components or removal of contaminants is a critical procedure and highly important to the precision and accuracy of an analysis. Activated carbon and alumina have been applied to nucleic acid hybridization assays and immunoassays to remove contaminants, shorten assay periods, simplify assay procedures, eliminate nonspecific binding, and achieve quantitative highly sensitive analyses at low cost, enabling mass screening and automated analysis; for example, activated carbon or alumina binds labelled DNA, poly- or oligo-nucleotides, or protein probes for analytical measure of the solution. Analysis of headspace volatiles is of utmost importance to the flavor chemist in the techniques of flavor characterization. The traditional technique is to inert gas-purge the liquid in a vessel while adsorbing the vaporized, volatile substances on an adsorbent-trap column. Gas chromatography has routinely used adsorbent partitioning as the primary mechanism of separation.
