Sercon History – Up to Date!
To bring the company’s history up to date from 2004 where we left off last month, three years after Sercon was conceived in 2001 as a support company for the Europa community:
In a busy 2005 we started our own development programme, creating the HT-EA for thermal decomposition of solid and liquid samples for 18O and 2H analysis. We also presented the TOC-IRMS system which uses cryotraps to produce the most sensitive and robust means of dissolved carbon isotopic determination handling samples from fresh water to sea water.
In 2006 Sercon was appointed as the worldwide distributor of 18O Water 10At% manufactured by Taiyo Nippon Sanso in Japan.
As well as developing our overseas representation through high quality and knowledgeable agent network, it was time to move to a much larger custom-built factory, which we completed in 2009, when we also became the world’s leading company dedicated to stable isotope ratio analysis and providing all services from instrumentation, consumables, spares, service and technical support, isotopically labelled compounds to 18O labelled water.
In 2010, we catapulted the 20-20 into the future by releasing the 20-22, an extensive development of software, control, electronics and inlets resulting in the most advanced IRMS system using the most robust and time proven ion optics. This was rapidly followed by the Integra2, ABCA2 and GEO 20-22 bringing our family of mass spectrometers to the forefront of scientific research technology.
2010 saw Sercon win its ISO9001 accreditation.
Also in 2010, the first hyphenated TOC-IRMS system referenced in this paper, leading to development of the standalone Thermalox TOC product.
In 2014 Sercon was awarded ISO13485 for the ABCA2 to go along with its FDA approval.
2018 Collaboration with BGS on the development of a system for the analysis of hydrogen isotopes in methane, leading to this method paper
2018 The Laser collaboration began in 2018 with the prototype of the IsoScell and culminated in the app notes on that product page, run on a system installed at LUKE in Finland ran by Katja T. Rinne-Garmston (Rinne). This is summarised as follows in section 7.3 of this paper : “Two new approaches to tree-ring stable isotope analysis have been established, which both utilize UV-laser systems. One of them is UV-laser assisted microdissection, which can be used to cut subsamples of tree rings that are subsequently manually prepared for isotopic analysis using the conventional methods (e.g. cellulose extraction, EA/HTC-IRMS analysis). The other UV-laser-based method enables on-line isotope analysis of tree rings, which is accomplished via laser ablation (as opposed to laser cutting). Both methods take advantage of the features of modern UV-laser systems, which support the sampling of tree tissues at a very high spatial resolution and accuracy”
In 2020 Sercon’s ABCA IR Breath Analyser for detection of Helicobacter Pylori was launched.
In 2021 Sercon Europe launched to bring the business closer to its continental based customer base.
Moving into this year, 2023, we’re delighted to have acquired Europa House, where it all began, and are planning a move to the refurbished building by summer 2024
