Claudia Swart, born in 1976, studied chemistry and received her diploma degree at the University of Regensburg. After her PhD at the Free University Berlin in the field of analytical chemistry with focus on archeometry, she started her professional career at the Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung in speciation analysis. Since 2008 she has worked at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) in Braunschweig, leading the working group Speciation Analysis since 2013. The main focus of this working group is the traceable quantification oft metal-containing analytes in laboratory diagnostics.

Activities

Claudia Swart has been the Vice-Chair of the Protein Analysis Working group at the Consultative Committee for Amount of Substance: Metrology in Chemistry and Biology (CCQM) since 2019. This working group to the International Committee for Weights and Measures (CIPM) deals with the assurance of the traceability of peptide and protein reference materials and measurement procedures at the highest international level of metrology, for example through organization of interlaboratory comparisons in which the international metrology institutes can prove their measurement capabilities. Furthermore, she is a member of the Protein Review group within the framework of the Joint Committee for Traceability in Laboratory Medicine (JCTLM). This group reviews reference materials and reference measurement procedures and recommends them for entry into the JCTLM data base. Additionally, she is a member of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker (GDCh).

Awards

Award of the Verband der Chemischen Industrie (VCI) for the best school leaving examination in chemistry in 1995, poster award at the Winter Conference on Plasma Spectrochemistry 2010 in Fort Myers, Florida, as well as a poster award at the Protein and Peptide Therapeutics and Diagnostics: Research and Quality Assurance International Workshop 2016 in Chengdu, China.

Focus

The focus of Claudia Swart’s scientific work is on the development of reference measurement procedures for the quantification of proteins via their metal content. In this approach, metal-containing proteins are quantified via their inherent metal content, while proteins not containing metals are labeled with metals or metal-containing compounds before quantification. The challenge is to ensure traceability to the International System of Units (SI) of the developed reference measurement procedures. For this purpose, exact-matching isotope dilution is applied wherever possible.

Methods

• Inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) in combination with chromatographic separation methods
• Inductively coupled plasma time-of-flight mass spectrometry (ICP-TOF-MS)
• Isotope dilution mass spectrometry (IDMS)