Your sample is gonna vary from plant to plant, even bud to bud on identical clones. The best way to get a real total representable sample would be to grind the entire plant down and pull your samples. You would want it to be dried, but samples can be placed in any style oven at 100 degrees C for a set # of hours or intervals. Weighed before and after to find the water and or dry content. So a sample from your stash can be extracted into a solution to use in HPLC or LCMS. Then the numbers you find can be adjusted for the water weight. The beautiful thing about liquid chromatography is that samples (cannabinoids/terpenes etc.) aren't destroyed in the analysis. Gas chromatographs are usually equipped with flame ionization detectors which as the name sounds, burns your samples into ionized forms that are then read by the detector. Would be great for butane analysis in extracts. Not exactly easy stuff to set up a proper analysis in terms of sample matrix. I'd love to see the SOP's these labs are following and some of their data. All reputable laboratories follow strict standards on instrument calibration and reproducible results with enough statistics to make you nauseous. Not doubting them, just a little knowledge thirsty. This is definitely something I'd be interested in doing if I had the time and money.
