Alltech Associates, Inc., one of the leading suppliers of HPLC columns, is a wholly owned subsidiary of W.R. Grace and Company-Conn. Alltech is a division of Grace Davison, a business unit of W.R. Grace that includes the product lines Alltech, Davisil, Chrom, Jones Chromatography, Modcol and Vydac.

Headquartered in Deerfield, Illinois, Alltech has branches and distributorships around the world including Europe, China, Japan and Australia.

Alltech manufactures and distributes columns, accessories and instrumentation for HPLC, GC, IC, TLC, SPE and sample handling.

Best known for its extensive number of brands, types and formats of HPLC columns including Altima, Prevail, Platinum, Apollo and Prosphere, Alltech also offers a wide variety of packed and capillary GC columns including its own line of Econo and Heliflex capillary columns as well as capillary columns from SGE, Quadrex and Astec.

Alltech also offers a large selection of consumables including autosampler and sample storage vials, syringes, filters, membranes, standards, gas purifiers, septa, fittings, ferrules and tubing.

The Alltech website includes an online store, a catalog, a free newsletter subscription application, a technical library and a database of chromatograms obtained using their columns.

The technical library includes more than 350 product support sheets and 160 technical articles and presentations in .pdf and Powerpoint formats that cover applications of their columns and provide guidance on use of their equipment.

More than 100 application notes for GC, HPLC and IC illustrate the use of their columns in a wide variety of determinations.

An even larger searchable database of chromatograms, ChromAccess, includes over 2800 GC, HPLC and IC chromatograms.

The database can be searched by analytical technique, chemical compound, keyword or column. As an example, once a search has been performed, a table with headings for discipline (analytical technique), chromatogram title and the column used appears listing the applicable chromatograms obtained by both HPLC and GC techniques. The chromatogram titles and columns used are all links that take the user to the chromatogram.

After clicking onto an individual chromatogram, a set of search boxes at the bottom of the page allows the user to see the industry focus (industrial category) and compound classes represented. Further searches can be done from these links, but the search functionality of the database would be enhanced by having them as options at the beginning of the search rather than in the middle.