Carbonate clumped isotope analyses with the long-integration dual-inlet (LIDI) workflow: scratching at the lower sample weight boundaries.

Rationale: Clumped isotope analyses (Δ ) of carbonates by dual inlet (DI) mass spectrometry require long integration times to reach the necessary high precision due to the low abundance of the rare isotopologue C O O. Traditional DI protocols reach this only with large amounts of sample and/or a large number of replicates as a large portion of the analyte gas is wasted. We tested an improved analytical workflow that significantly reduces the sample sizes and total analysis time per sample while preserving precision and accuracy.

Community software for challenging isotope analysis: First applications of 'Easotope' to clumped isotopes.

Rationale: The measurement of complex isotope systems, notably the multiply substituted isotopologues of CO derived from carbonates, is challenging from a mass spectrometric point of view, but it is also time consuming and difficult from a data reduction and normalization perspective. Dedicated software often lags behind and currently limits fast, reliable and reproducible data analysis and inter-laboratory reproducibility.

Methods: We have developed new community software 'Easotope' using Java and the Eclipse framework.