The Application Notebook 06-01-22

Using a mass spectrometer as a gas chromatography (GC) detector has many advantages for compound identification and quantification, but there is another less-known benefit: speeding up analyses by using the mass spectrometry (MS) vacuum to lower pressure within the column. This technique, also known as “vacuum‑outlet GC” or “low-pressure GC–MS” (LPGC–MS), can provide significant gains for fast GC–MS.

Pesticide testing is crucial to assessing the safety of fruits and vegetables for consumption. The traditional extraction method for pesticides from produce is the QuEChERS method. This method is tedious, manual, time consuming, and wasteful. Thus, there is a need for improved methods of extraction. In this application note, the EDGE®, in combination with Q-Matrix™ Hydra, a water-removing sorbent, was used to extract a panel of pesticides from 10 g of homogenized cucumber, tomato, and green pepper in less than 9 min. The recoveries of the pesticide panel were greater than 70% for each matrix tested, and these results were highly reproducible. The EDGE provides a fully automated extraction that combines both the sample and sorbent into one sample vessel, alleviating the human burden of extraction and the need for multiple sample transfers.

Mirtazapine is an approved antidepressant, with other studies exploring its use to treat sleep apnea, substance abuse withdrawal symptoms, and as an antihistamine.

Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) are effective therapeutics for cancers, auto-immune diseases, viral infections, and other diseases. Recent developments in antibody therapeutics aim to add more specific binding regions (bi- and multi-specificity) to increase their effectiveness and/or to downsize the molecule to the specific binding regions (for example, scFv or Fab fragment) to achieve better penetration of the tissue. As the molecule gets more complex, the possible high and low molecular weight (H/LMW) impurities become more complex, too. In order to accurately analyze the various species, more advanced detection than ultraviolet (UV) is required to characterize a mAb sample.