Structural elucidation, identification and quantitative analysis of organic chemicals by chromatographic techniques coupled to mass spectrometry and UV/Vis spectroscopy

My research career over a period of 46 years to date has resulted in 200 refereed journal publications and book chapters, 80 national conference papers and 60 international conference papers. From these, 84 representative refereed journal publications and 6 book chapters have been selected for inclusion and are reproduced here in full. All publications other than References 83 and 84 resulted from research undertaken while employed in the Organic Mass Spectrometry Facility of the Central Science Laboratory at the University of Tasmania in various roles, starting as a Research Fellow in 1979, and ending with appointment as an Adjunct Professor in 2017. This research includes pure and applied analytical chemistry, and natural product chemistry. Underpinning all of this were the separation techniques of gas chromatography (GC) and liquid chromatography (HPLC and UHPLC), the detection and characterisation methods of mass spectrometry (MS) and UV-Vis spectroscopy, and the coupling of the chromatographic techniques with the detection and characterisation methods. 40% of the applications relate to the broad discipline of chemical ecology, covering chemical communication between members of the same species of insect or mammal (e.g., sex pheromones, trail pheromones, aggregation pheromones, territorial marking secretions), innate and induced chemical defences of plants against herbivory, the adaptive metabolic processes the herbivores use to deal with an otherwise toxic chemical load, and the induced chemical responses of plants to microbial infection. The major proportion of these publications resulted from local, national, and international collaborations with biological, agricultural, and medical scientists, and their postgraduate students, with the remainder being collaborations with other chemists. For the former collaborations I was generally the only or else senior analytical chemist. Fourteen papers published between 1982 and 1992 as sole or lead author which were the basis of my PhD are not included in this thesis, but for context these references are provided (page xxii).