Activities and Events
6 January 2020
Corine Lormel, Ph.D. In the past month, several pictures of chemistry Christmas trees also named chemistrees probably blossomed in your news feeds. As some of us in the laboratory, you assume this phenomenon is recent and the pioneers are very passionate about chemistry. Of course, a bunch of enthusiasts is necessary but those who have
Popularization
13 December 2019
Corine Lormel, Ph.D. Some customers are surprised to see a compound named ‘’Unknown’’ in the listing of their essential oils analysis reports. Why do chemists keep them in all reports? Are they just unidentified compounds? Why don’t chemists try to identify them? In this paper, we will try to understand what is behind the famous
Popularization
27 November 2019
Corine Lormel, Ph.D. You probably don’t know these terms, but you will soon! Environmental concerns are not limited yet to the public domain! These last years, labs environmental impact, that went unnoticed, has been rising. Just two weeks ago, The Guardian (Bell, 2019) published an article focusing on the “addiction to plastic” in the labs
Popularization
21 October 2019
Benoit Roger (Ph. D.), Hubert Marceau (B. Sc., chemist), Alexis St-Gelais (M. Sc., chemist) Have you ever tried cooking pasta atop a high mountain? OK, this is a weird introduction, but you’ll see the link. Everybody ‘’knows“ that (pure) water freezes at 0 °C and boils at 100 °C and in everyday life, this is a good
Research notes
Benoit Roger (Ph. D.), Hubert Marceau (B. Sc., chemist), Alexis St-Gelais (M. Sc., chemist) Have you ever tried cooking pasta atop a high mountain? OK, this is a weird introduction, but you’ll see the link. Everybody ‘’knows’’ that (pure) water freezes at 0 °C and boils at 100 °C and in everyday life, this is
Research notes
13 September 2019
Alexis St-Gelais (M. Sc., Chemist), Benoit Roger, Kim Desrosiers, Hubert Marceau This poster (awarded a Poster Prize) was presented to the scientific community during the 50th International Symposium on Essential Oils in Vienna, Austria, on September 9th-11th 2019. Click here to see the poster as a PDF. Thanks to Lavinia Alexandru for the photo. Entitled Chemometric
Activities and Events
7 June 2019
Alexis St-Gelais, M. Sc., Chemist – Activities and Events PhytoChemia has always been proud to provide the essential oils community with GC-FID results obtained from a dual-column system – just as it is done in academia. This powerful approach is able to solve most coelutions and reach a high level of detail in analyses in
Discoveries
25 February 2019
Benoit Roger, Ph. D. & Alexis St-Gelais, M. Sc., Chemist Vetiver (Vetiveria zizanioides, syn. Chrysopogon zizanioides) is one of the essential oils we receive the most often for analysis. This is also one of the most complex oil to analyse as it contains almost only sesquiterpenoids among which a lot of unknown compounds with poor
Popularization
26 January 2019
Popularization – Alexis St-Gelais, M. Sc., chimiste Analysis reports for essential oils profiles most often report some total of the compounds identifications. In our reports, as in scientific literature, the total almost never makes it to 100%. However, many other testing laboratories consistently report that they identified 100% of their oils in routine. How is
Plant profiles
8 January 2019
Sylvain Mercier, M. Sc., chimiste At PhytoChemia, we always like to seek around us to find interesting plants to distill. This summer, we performed several distillations of different plants. You will find in this blog post a summary of our 2018 summer distillations along with the general composition of essential oils that we obtained, their