News from SteepHill Halent

Today's email communication with the chemist at Steep Hill Halent Laboratories:

Hi <Guys>,

I had a chance to discuss your data with another chemist. It definitely looks like a petroleum product. From the fragmentation in the mass spectrometer, we can say that some of the compounds contain alkane, cycloalkane and aromatic functional groups.

We're keenly interested in helping you learn more about this, but understand that research can be costly and time consuming. To minimize costs, I'd suggest that we can continue by running two of our other routine tests, GC-MS for pesticides, which won't show pesticides, but should give us better signal than the GC-MS residual solvent analysis, and an HPLC potency test, which uses an HPLC-MS using a softer ionization technique, electrspray ionization, than the GC-MS and may allow us to discover the molecular ion, instead of just looking at fragments of ions. The GC-MS test for pesticides is $120 and the HPLC potency is $100. I'd also like to include an hour of consulting time for data analysis at $200 per hour for a total of $420.

The additional routine test should give us some more information without the time and cost associated with developing new methods just for this analysis. If we're able to identify a unique peak using either of these analyses, that coul also be a starting point for verifying products are free of this mystery oil.

Please let me know what you think.

Regards, <Chemist>

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I have ok'd the further testing and the chemist said that he would be performing the tests this week and should have all the information compiled by Tuesday.

I was also assured by one of Steep Hill's founders that it is their strong intention to get to the bottom of this as quickly as time and money would allow.

Thank-you for sharing.