Zagreb, 25 Jan 2010 - Analytical Chemistry (IF: 5.712), the world's leading journal in the field of analytical chemistry, has accepted for publication paper Blind separation of analytes in nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and mass spectrometry: sparseness-based robust multicomponent analysis by Ivica Kopriva, PhD (DLARD) and Ivanka Jerić, PhD (DOCB). The paper describes a method for blind extraction of analytes from mixtures. The method is exemplified on the examples in NMR spectroscopy and mass spectrometry.

Original contribution of the paper is theoretical and experimental demonstration of the extraction of analytes the number of which exceeds the number of mixtures. It has been considered within the chemometrics community so far that this problem is too ill-posed and, thus, insolvable. Potential application of obtained result is in biomarker detection, natural product analysis and metabolomics. The paper is a result of the two-years collaboration efforts that already yielded three scientific papers and two international patent applications.