Quality Control to Rule Out False-Positive NIAS Findings

LCGC International spoke to Marinella Vitulli—founder of Food Contact Center and Food Contact Services—about her work and her presentation at the recent ASMS conference titled, "Untargeted HRMS Screening of Emerging Contaminants in Food Contact Materials: PFAS, Bisphenols, and NIAS.”¹ The talk detailed a suspect and non-target HRMS screening workflow built around proprietary spectral libraries for food contact material (FCM) safety assessment.

In this interview clip, Vitulli discusses:

• What quality control criteria do you apply to minimize false positive annotations, particularly for low-abundance NIAS where isotopic confirmation may be difficult?

She ties false-positive control directly to her lab's replicate testing design. Every sample is analyzed in at least duplicate, more often triplicate, specifically so inconsistent detections can be caught: if a compound appears in one replicate but not the others under otherwise identical conditions, that inconsistency itself is treated as a flag for cross-contamination rather than a genuine migrant or extractable. She describes this reproducibility check, run at the same surface-to-volume ratio and concentration as the reference sample, as a baseline requirement before any low-abundance finding is reported with confidence.

Alongside replication, her lab runs a simulant-only blank in the same oven used for sample testing, with no material present, specifically to isolate contamination introduced by the oven or other parts of the lab environment from anything genuinely migrating from the packaging itself. Vitulli connects this directly back to the filtration-related cross-contamination she flags elsewhere in her workflow: batches of filters certified free of PFAS, bisphenols, and phthalates can still introduce trace amounts of those same compound classes once an extract is concentrated, so blanks are run under matched concentration conditions to catch that specific artifact, rather than assuming a clean filter certificate is sufficient on its own to rule out background interference.

References

1. Vitulli, M. Cozzolino, F.; Pratesi, F. Untargeted HRMS Screening of Emerging Contaminants in Food Contact Materials: PFAS, Bisphenols, and NIAS. Presented at ASMS 2026, in San Diego, California, USA. https://asms.org/docs/default-source/conference/74th-asms-final-program_as-of-may-8-2026.pdf?sfvrsn=1234fc3_0 (accessed 2026-08-06).