Authors

Nelson B1 | Strathmann F1

Affiliations

1. NMS Labs, Willow Grove, PA, USA

Abstract 

The Agilent RapidFire 365 high-throughput MS System and Agilent 6545 LC/Q-TOF(RF/Q-TOF) have been used to develop an efficient, qualitative method for the simultaneous analysis of a subset of analytes currently screened by ELISA. This method uses a supported liquid extraction (SLE) before RF injection and Q-TOF auto-MS/MS data acquisition. A personal compound database library (PCDL) provides scoring criteria to confirm the presence or absence of analytes of interest by comparing acquired spectra to known high-quality spectra at various collision energies (CEs). This methodology was compared to a 263-analyte postmortem blood screen currently used in our laboratory, which uses a liquid-liquid extraction(LLE) followed by a 10 minute LC/TOF analysis. RF/Q-TOF data acquisition averages 10 seconds per injection, illustrating the potential to improve the current screening time by 60x. Using the Q-TOF to acquire high-resolution accurate mass data that can be matched to a spectral database also gives a greater degree of confidence in positivity over the TOF’s accurate mass and retention time data alone.

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