Analytical chemistry laboratories — in academia, government, or industry — run on instrumentation. Whether they are establishing the identity of a newly synthesized material, or probing the properties of some bioactive compound, researchers have a broad array of hardware that can help. Indeed, today’s analytical chemists have at their disposal a veritable alphabet soup of options, from GC-MS and NMR to ICP and MALDI. And that toolbox is growing, with new developments appearing in the literature seemingly every week. Many of these tools are used not only in the chemistry lab but increasingly, in the biological sciences and other non-traditional realms as well. Inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS), for instance, is growing in popularity as a method to multiplex protein detection and quantitation at the cellular level, a method called “mass cytometry.” Raman and infrared spectroscopy are being coupled with microscopy to create tools capable of detecting molecular signatures in biological tissue.