Author: UCT

Cannabidiol (CBD) is a non-psychoactive cannabinoid that increased in prevalence after the passing of the 2018 Farm Bill. Products are largely unregulated and touted as offering holistic health benefits. CBD was also FDA approved for use as the pharmaceutical Epidiolex which is used in the treatment of epileptic seizures in adolescents. Even though CBD use…

Fentanyl and its analogues have become of increasing interest to forensic toxicologists with the rise in prevalence of the compounds on the illicit drug market. They are often implicated in overdose deaths, so they have become part of routine postmortem analysis in many forensic laboratories. Brain tissue is a useful matrix for postmortem analysis as…

Poppy seeds cause a positive drug test. What was once thought of as an urban legend is now a very real worry for forensic toxicologists. Over recent years, several studies have been released highlighting the existence of codeine-predominant poppy seed products that could produce urinary codeine levels above cutoff thresholds after consumption and create false…

Disinfection is a crucial step in delivering safe drinking water, and chloramines, particularly monochloramine, are widely used in the U.S. for their ability to maintain a stable disinfectant residual and reduce the formation of halogenated disinfection byproducts. However, they come with a hidden cost: the potential formation ofnitrosamines, especially N-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA), a human carcinogen. NDMA…

In low-level analysis, the purity of your reagents is paramount. As you concentrate yourextracts down to just a few hundred microliters to meet critical detection limits, even theslightest impurities can disrupt your baseline and compromise your results. That’s why UCT developed the Enviro-Clean ® line of solid-phase extraction products.Crafted from the finest purified raw materials…

Biomonitoring measures the amount of a chemical substance and its metabolites in biological samples. It can be used to assess the bioavailability and exposure of humans and other animals to these chemicals. For example, prolonged mercury exposure can result in adverse effects on the central nervous and renal systems. Different species of mercury have different…