Bruker to Buy Michrom for Nanoflow UHPLC System and CaptiveSpray Ionization Source Technology

Bruker has agreed to buy Michrom Bioresources, a privately owned Auburn, California-based firm providing advanced liquid chromatography instrumentation, accessories, and consumables for the life sciences, chemical, and applied markets. The firm’s flagship products include its Advance™ nanoflow ultra-high performance liquid chromatography (UHPLC) platform and CaptiveSpray™ Ionization sources for coupling to mass spectrometry in proteomics and life-science applications. The firm achieved revenues of about $3 million in 2010.

“Michrom’s broad portfolio of novel technologies and high-performance products is highly complementary to our mass spectrometry products,” comments Collin D’Silva, president of Bruker’s chemical and applied markets division. “In particular, Michrom’s new high duty-cycle nanoflow UHPLC platform, along with their revolutionary CaptiveSpray LC-MS interface, together will provide our customers with significant gains in throughput, sensitivity, and robustness for proteomics and other nano and capillary flow LC-MS applications.”

Michrom describes the Advance nanoflow platform as a splitless nanocapillary high-performance instrument designed to provide precise, reproducible separations from 100 nL/min to 50,000 nL/min with no hardware changes. The Advance nanoLC features <25 nL delay volume and operates up to 10,000 PSI (70MPa) providing the ability to run long columns for extremely high resolution and eliminating both delay and re-equilibration times. 

The firm’s Advance CaptiveSpray Ionization source technology has been developed to provide what Michrom calls the next step in the evolution of LC/MS (0.1–100 µL/min) to bridge the operation gap in flow, sensitivity, and robustness between conventional electrospray ionization (ESI) and nanospray ionization (NSI). The technology is essentially plug-and-play, Michrom claims, requiring no cameras or xyz alignment, while providing ESI robustness with NSI sensitivity.