06 July 2011 New laboratory's technical team keen to 'stay ahead of the game'

It's teamwork and collaboration all the way in the daily running of the National Centre for Nitrous Oxide Measurement at Lincoln University.

Technical staff Manjula Premaratne, Tom Simpson and Angela Reid, representing a mix of Lincoln University and AgResearch affiliations, have established themselves as a smooth running team since the Centre was launched on 1 April this year.

The three work with determination and cooperation towards meeting the Centre's capacity to process more than 1000 nitrous oxide samples a day.

"Since we opened we have processed some 30,000 samples," says Manjula, "and I believe that we have the greatest capacity of any laboratory of this type in the world.

"But while we are proud of the speed of our through-put, quality is the real criterion for judging the Centre.

"Monitoring and maintaining the quality of our analyses and data recording processes absorbs our attention very much.

"Every single run has its own set of standards per day, and we watch very carefully to ensure our measurements stay inside the expected parameters."

Although Manjula, Tom and Angela are on duty the length of a normal working day, the Centre's equipment runs around the clock.

Samples typically arrive by courier first thing in a morning - anything up to 600 at a time - and they are prepared and loaded into the SRI gas chromatographs. The samples come from throughout the country, for example the AgResearch ones come from lnvermay, Ruakura and Palmerston North. Angela and Tom generally looks after these ones, but it's all teamwork according to the workload.

Manjula usually works on the samples from Lincoln University's own research, particularly the nitrification inhibitor work of Professors Hong Di and Keith Cameron and their postgraduate students.

Emissions inventories work by Professor Frank Kelliher provides another stream of samples for the Centre.