The cover story of this month titled: “Everything You Need to Know About Liquid Handling”. This process is obviously standardized by replicate assays, multiple operators, multiple runs, and using different instruments. To this end, the first line of defense is a handheld pipette or a liquid dispenser. You might think about the presence of liquid-handling instruments so commonplace that you take it for granted. But ongoing improvements in liquid-handling instruments are allowing lab work to be much more accurate, precise, and reproducible.

The edition has a featured article entitled “Pharmaceutical quality control: The Reference Standards Labyrinth " contributed by LGC Mikromol reference standards, Dr. Martina Kotthaus, describing the different types of reference standards used by the pharmaceutical industry. A pharmacopoeial RS has been shown to be fit for its compendial purpose, but has not been demonstrated to be fit for any other purpose; this needs to be proven by the user. Consequently, challenges of compendial standard use for non-compendial purposes have been reported in regulatory inspections.