The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office has awarded PerkinElmer Inc. Patent No. 7,422,625 B2 covering an advanced method in gas chromatography (GC). The patent, titled "Methods and Systems for Characterizing a Sorbent Tube," protects the company's proprietary methods that help gas chromatographers increase the accuracy of their results when using automated thermal desorption (ATD) GC. PerkinElmer's automatic verification method described in the patent is deployed in the company's TurboMatrix Thermal Desorber product line of GC systems to help users avoid manual errors in ATD measurement, which can cause inconsistent results and compromise sample integrity.