Analytical Cannabis Testing with Best in Class Sample Prep and Data Integrity
Accurate and Consistent Lab Work Deserves Reliable and Precise Equipment
Are you testing for pesticides, mycotoxins, residual solvents, heavy metals, terpenes or cannabinoids? You can have the highest sensitivity and performance in terms of your analytical equipment but are your samples up to scratch? The quality of your results will largely depend on the quality of the samples as the best analysis starts with the best sample prep. We can help.
Testing of cannabis products from dried flowers to edibles is highly regulated and as state and country rules evolve, the requirements imposed on laboratories continue to grow. To meet these new and more stringent demands, regardless of what you’re analyzing, you’ll need robust and reliable lab equipment to perform your daily lab tasks and to guarantee consumer safety.
- Specify mass and moisture content of your samples using precise balances and super-fast moisture analyzers
- Use ultrapure water to prepare your samples and run your chromatography tests
- Flow your work with robust and accurate pipettes, tips and bottle top dispensers
- Simply and safely remove solids from your sample with syringe filters
- Choose from a range of analytical and precision balances that not only deliver the best weighing results but focus on making your analytical workflows more efficient, reliable and ergonomic.
With 150 year track record, Sartorius smart solutions will help you keep your processes and products under control. As a manufacturer of intelligent premium lab tools for sample preparation, we can help you build efficient workflows and improve your data integrity for your Cannabis analysis while you concentrate on achieving high quality results and safe products.
Featured Publications
Editorial
Never Underestimate Sample Preparation
In an interview with New Food’s Editor, Wallace Harvey from Sartorius explains the importance of sample preparation in cannabis testing and the work it is doing to help develop standardisation across the board.
Infographic
Analysis of Active and Toxic Substances in Cannabis - Common Methods and Challenges of Sample Preparation
Cannabis has garnered a great deal of new attention due to the increasing instances of its legalization for recreational use and indications for medicinal benefit.
Despite a growing number of laboratories focused on cannabis analysis, the separation science literature pertaining to the determination of cannabis natural products is still in its infancy.
Applications | Products
Determination of Mass and Moisture Content
If your lab is specialized in testing the potency of cannabis products you need to perform physical analyses to understand the cannabinoid and terpene content. For instance, you need to test the mass and moisture content of your samples. Performing measurements in a time-and cost efficient manner, while delivering accurate results, in compliance with strict regulations at the same time, sometimes seems to be a challenging balancing act. Speed up your moisture determination process with our fully automatic Moisture Analyzer MA 160, which cuts down your measurement times from hours to only minutes. And find firm support with our lab balances, which ensure accurate and reliable weight determination and compliant results. Our software supports your data integrity through enhanced security settings.
The MA 160 moisture analyzer is designed for quick and reliable moisture determination of materials containing a total moisture in between 1% and 99%. Its high speed measurements do not only make the MA 160 a perfect solution for quality control, but additionally enable quick at-line measurements during sample preparation.
Make your Cannabis QC samples preparations easy with our revolutionary Unique Interface: The Sartorius Quintix® Pro redefines the standard in lab weighing.
Fully automated internal adjustment, direct data transfer, and newly updated features transforming your Cannabinoid testing workflow. The convenient operating design with its easy –to-understand menu structure and standard applications will significantly help accelerate your workflows right from the start for error-free results.
Water for HPLC and Sample Prep
When analyzing cannabis and CBD products for purity, ultrapure water is the basis for safe and economical analytics, reducing interference and ensuring accurate measurements of cannabinoids and terpenes. The use of high-quality, ultrapure water is important for all daily standard applications in analytic labs, such as preparing stock solutions, buffers, or to dilute samples, but is especially important when performing chromatographic analyzes, such as HPLC, GC-MS or IC.
Water is used heavily for rinsing and dilution of samples to be tested. Furthermore, it is used for the preparation of certified reference materials within the calibration and testing of the instrumentation (GS-MS, HPLC) to evaluate the samples for contamination in the Cannabis testing process.
Our Arium® laboratory-grade water purification systems will inspire you with their application-oriented operating designs. The Arium systems enable you to perform your workflows faster and more reliably, make your daily lab work easier and ensure long-term economical operation. They can be perfectly integrated into your laboratory environment and easily adapted to your requirements, so they provide ultimate flexibility.
The Arium® Pro ultrapure water systems meet, and exceed, ASTM Type 1 water quality at an unmatched cost of ownership for any application. Available in a choice of five modular-design systems, this range offers the widest selection of features and options for customized configuration. The glass display with touch-activated functions, along with intuitive menu navigation, ensures error-free operation, even while you are wearing gloves.
The Arium® Mini is designed for a water requirement of less than 10 liters per day. It delivers consistently high water quality for reliable and reproducible results. Depending on the model type, you can save yourself the hassle of time-consuming tank cleaning with the unique bagtank technology.
Pipettes and Bottle Top Dispenser
A reliable and precise pipette is the indispensable right hand of each lab assistant and is therefore a must in every laboratory. Using advanced tips with your high-quality pipettes ensures the pipettes will last for a lifetime. Getting accurate cannabinoid and terpene content measurements are critical when analyzing cannabis and CBD products. Tips featuring low-binding technology plastics and manufactured without any leachables that may interfere with chemical analysis are critical for obtaining these accurate measurements. And if your testing procedure requires you to repeatedly portion out exact volumes of liquids involved, our bottle-top dispensers will give you a steady hand to ensure accurate and consistent results.
Superb comfort and incontestable reliability. That’s how Tacta® makes pipetting effortless and safe while producing accurate and consistent results time after time.
The Tacta® pipette is chemically very durable and it offers you the possibility to use Safe-Cone filters, which protect the pipette from any solvent fumes that may occur while preparing Cannabis products for chemical analysis. Furthermore, with it’s easy-to-clean design Tacta® facilitates thorough decontamination of its pipette parts before microbiological testing.
The unique and replaceable polyethylene (PE) Safe-Cone Filters act as an ultimate barrier to prevent any fluids and liquid vapors from reaching the internal components of your pipette. To address the specific requirements of your medical Cannabis testing, you can choose from two types of Safe-Cone Filters, Standard and Self-sealing Plus. Rest assured, no matter which type you choose, Safe-Cone Filters prolong the lifetime of your pipette and ward off any contamination from your samples.
Sartorius manufactures pipette tips according to ISO 13485 standard, using premium raw materials in an automated, certified ISO 8 cleanroom manufacturing environment, to deliver products that meet the highest quality and purity standards. To ensure that your heavy metal testing is accurate our tips are manufactured from virgin polypropylene that guarantees low levels of trace metals in our pipette tips. The tips also exhibit excellent chemical resistance and compatibility, ensuring reliable results for your highly sensitive chemical analysis of tetrahydrocannabinol cannabidiol (THC/CBD) ratio in HPLC or GC-MS. To find out more on compatibility with specific substances, check out the Compatibility Chart on our product pages.
Sartorius bottle-top dispensers and burettes are safe, convenient, and customizable. They fit perfectly for a wide range of dispensing needs.
Removal of solids and particles
Preparing cannabis plant material for subsequent analyses requires step-by-step removal of coarse and fine particulates down to the submicron range. Sartorius offers products and solutions to accompany you throughout the whole clarification process.
Choose from our wide range of Minisart® Syringe Filters or Claristep® Syringeless Filters to efficiently eliminate the finest particles. Let us support you in your cannabis testing lab by ensuring your extracts are free of particulate contaminants, so you will not only achieve analytical results free of interference, but you will also achieve the most accurate assessment of cannabinoid and terpene levels and increase the lifetime of your chromatographic columns.
Sartorius Minisart® syringe filters are the No. 1 choice for analytical sample preparation! Innovative design features, coupled with the largest surface areas and fastest flow rates make Minisart® syringe filters the ideal choice for all your syringe filtration needs during the process of Cannabis product analysis.
The manually operated Claristep® Filtration System consists of a station and various filter units to choose from, and it provides you an innovative novel way to clarify your Cannabis product samples prior to analysis. The Claristep® Filters eliminate the need to use syringes and are particularly suitable for working with small sample volumes of 60 to 600 µl. And by using the accessory Claristep® Station you will be able to process up to eight samples simultaneously, speeding up sample throughput and cutting down on hands-on time.
HPLC Sample Prep | Preparation of standards
You must prepare a standard series with defined concentrations, if your cannabis testing lab is performing quantitative HPLC, GC-MS or ICP-MS to analyze cannabis, CBD edibles, and other CBD products. Without standards, you cannot know the potency of the active ingredients, such as THC, other cannabinoids, and terpenes, and cannot discern active ingredients from contaminants, such as pesticides, heavy metals or residual solvents and processing chemical. Certified reference material (CRM), however, constitutes a substantial expense, in particular for high-throughput testing labs. Producing your own high-quality reference materials (RM) for your analytical testing lab offers a cost-effective alternative, but must be performed with the highest precision to meet the strict legal requirements of cannabis testing regulations and ensure consumer safety. The Sartorius Cubis® MSA Dosing System provides a smart combination of innovative products to support you in precisely weighing for your analyses, and exactly defining and dosing the accurate volumes of solvents to produce high-quality, compliant RMs for your quantitative cannabis analysis.
The Cubis® MSA Dosing System simplifies your workflows in the preparation of analytical standards for Cannabis testing. Right after you entered the desired concentration(s) of the component(s) and the volume of the standard solution, the Cubis® MSA Dosing System automatically calculates the required amount of sample to be weighed and the target weight is shown as a bar graph including tolerances. With this solution the preparation of standards will be easier for you than it has ever been before. In high throughput testing environments, where larger volumes of many different types of standards are required, the dosing system fits in perfectly as a cost-effective and fast alternative to purchasing pre-made standards.
- The perfectly integrated system will ensure highly accurate weighing by the Cubis® MSA balance and precise dispensing of solvents using automatic dispensers or electronic or manual pipettes.
- Its software application will control system components by the YAPP16 Dosing Q-App.
- Through automatic preparation of standards it will maximize efficiency and minimize your processing time while still ensuring utmost accuracy and precision.
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Lab Weighing & Moisture
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