Chemistry 'will play vital role' in Olympic and Paralympic games

Chemistry is set to play a vital role in the Olympic and Paralymic games, which is why Emma Davies from Chemistry World has decided to take an in-depth look at what will be going on in the world of chemistry throughout the summer in the UK. 

GlaxoSmithKline’s site in Harlow will be one of the focal points for chemists during the Games this summer. As the opening ceremony nears, gas chromatographs and mass spectrometers are being prepared to be worked to their limits at the site where 150 scientists will be working around the clock to test up to 400 blood and urine samples per day.

King’s College London’s Drug Control Centre will be running the anti-doping drug testing this year, with the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) accredited programme tasked with analysing more than 6,200 samples for as many as 400 banned substances across a range of pharmacological categories. The most challenging aspect for the scientists involved will be the rapid turnaround time required, with most negative results set to take less than 24 hours to be announced.

In order to achieve these strict goals and to avoid any mistakes, each sample will be barcoded in order to let the testing centre know where any sample is at any time and who is handling it. The majority of samples taken will be urine, but 1,000 or more will be blood, according to David Cowan who heads the Olympic testing team.

Nicola Gray, an analyst in the 2012 testing labs said: "We load the sample into a cartridge, and the analytes we want to look at are trapped inside while we wash it with a range of solvents to get rid of all the rubbish."

Liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) is then used to screen samples for prohibited compounds based on their masses. "We look for the masses of the banned compounds at characteristic times in the chromatogram and see if they are there or not," Gray explains.

Posted by Ben Evans