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Two privately-owned firms shared the top honors at this year's Pittcon Editor's Awards, while a small English firm making its first appearance at the show took a trophy under the noses of many much larger and more established firms. 

A panel of attending industry journalists asked to select the most interesting and novel products making their debut at the exhibition selected two products for the Gold award out of 26 nominations. Receiving the same number of votes were the Citius LCMS from Leco Corp and the TrueSurface Microscopy Raman spectrometer from WITec GmbH. Targeting the metabolomics market, the Citius LCMS was described by one juror as an MS instrument having "probably the highest resolving power and best acquisition rate" of any system on the market, with comparable sensitivity to competing systems. The innovative WITec instrument makes rough material surfaces available for accurate Raman measurements. The system topographically maps the surface, so that the Raman spectrometer can be focused precisely. 

The Silver award went to the Samplicity from EMD Millipore. The product uses a semi-automated approach to filter samples of various viscosities. The jury found that the equipment made a tedious and laborious everyday sample preparation procedure easier, freeing scientists to concentrate on their real work. Finally, the AstraGene UV spectrometer for the non-destructive measurement of DNA, RNA and protein samples from the Cambridge-based AstraNet Systems won the Bronze award. Here the pipette tip acts as the sample vial, so that no precious sample gets lost. 

Other nomination were: the Micro ESR, Active Spectrum; MINI FLASH TOUCH, Ametek (Grabener); the Assure NMR software and the MAXIS 4G MS, Bruker; GC-Tof MS, DANI Instruments; CALIDUS micro GC, Falcon; Mini GC, Forston Labs; EGA/PY 3030D, Frontier Lab; Aqualog Absorbance/Fluorescent spectrometer, HORIBA; NanoPhotometer Pearl, Implen; Spiral Tof-Tof and InTouch Scope SEM, JEOL; Excellence Flash DSC 1, Mettler Toledo; 889IC Sample Center, Metrohm; Centrifan PE, Modular SFC: Perfinity Workstation, Perfinity/Shimadzu; Epsilon 3 EDXRF, PANalytical; LCMS 8030, Shimadzu; Niton FXL XRF, Thermo Fisher Scientific; Unifi software integration package, ACQUITY UPSFC and ACQUITY UPLC 2D Tech, Waters.

For further information on Pittcon 2011 please visit www.pittcon.org