Helmut Muenster

The screening of pesticides, mycotoxins, and veterinary drugs is of great importance in regulated environments such as food or feed analysis. Due to some of the limitations of traditional triple quadrupole approaches (for example, targeted analyte detection, limited number of compounds, and unidentified unknown compounds), there is currently a trend towards use of full-scan MS data for the analysis of residue samples. Current screening approaches mainly rely on the use of ToF instruments coupled to U-HPLC delivering mass accuracy (~5 ppm) at a maximum resolution of <15,000. This can produce inaccurate mass measurements due the presence of unresolved background matrix interferences. In this work we show a full-scan MS screening approach with the Thermo Scientific Exactive mass spectrometer, a novel single-stage Orbitrapâ„¢ MS capable of providing precise mass accuracies at resolutions of up to 100,000 without the need for internal mass calibration.

The authors discuss the use of high-resolution LC-MS to analyze complex samples in regulated environments such as food and animal-feed analysis.