© ISTOCK.COM/TARIKVISION One of the two high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) machines in Lakshminarasimhan Pranatharthiharan’s lab at Sunovion Pharmaceuticals in Marlborough, Massachusetts, wasn’t working. The instrument’s readouts—a series of peaks that indicate the components of the drugs that Pranatharthiharan’s group analyzes—were jumping around all over the place.
Troubleshooting the machine and complaining to the supplier of the columns used in the instrument failed to turn up a solution. So Pranatharthiharan’s team stuck a cloud-connected temperature sensor right next to the machine in question. After several days of using an electronic lab notebook (ELN) to record the temperature readings from the device, the team identified the problem: the building’s climate control system was blowing hot and cold air at specific times every day in the vicinity of the instrument. “If you happen to be running the analysis at that time: boom”—the readouts wouldn’t be accurate, Pranatharthiharan says. Once they figured out their building’s temperature fluctuations, he and his group were able to get their analyses back on track.
It’s a prime example of ...
