NIST EXPANDS ITS LIBRARY OF 'CHEMICAL FINGERPRINTS' TO IDENTIFY UNKNOWN SUBSTANCES

WASHINGTON, June 9 -- The U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards & Technology issued the following press release:

Whether you're a researcher stumped by a mystery compound or a manufacturer perplexed by an unknown substance, there's a major resource you can rely on: a library of chemical fingerprints, known as mass spectra, that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has maintained for decades.

Now, NIST has released the latest update to that library, which industry experts, forensic scientists and others have used since 1988 to identify unknown substances in food, drugs, cosmetics, the environment and even space rocks.

The expanded library, formally known as Standard Reference Database 1A, conta...