Thermo Fisher Scientific Introduces Complete LC/MS/MS Food Safety Testing Solution at PITTCON

Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., the world leader in serving science, today announced a complete food and environmental safety testing solution designed to help laboratories meet increasingly stringent monitoring requirements, simplify analysis and boost productivity. The Thermo Scientific workflow solution features the TSQ Quantum Access MAX™ triple-stage quadrupole mass spectrometry system and TraceFinder™ software, which comes with pre-configured methods. The new solution was launched at the Thermo Scientific booth at PITTCON 2009, March 9-12 in Chicago.

The unique ability of this system to perform structural confirmation and library matching enables it to confirm and quantitate hundreds of compounds in a single experiment, dramatically increasing sample throughput and lowering cost per sample.

“TraceFinder software provides food and environmental laboratories with the tools to react quickly to the need to detect new contaminants in the food supply,” said Dipankar Ghosh, strategic marketing manager for environmental and food safety solutions at Thermo Fisher Scientific. “The built-in methods database reduces method development time from hours or days to minutes by providing optimized conditions for analytes.”

Thermo Scientific TSQ Quantum Access MAX
The new TSQ Quantum Access MAX mass spectrometer (MS) is based on the proven TSQ Quantum triple-stage quadrupole platform and features a mass range of m/z 10 to 3,000. The system can perform up to 3,000 highly selective reaction monitoring (H-SRM) acquisitions, enabling a higher tolerance for precursor ion selection for quantitative assays. This provides increased analyte selectivity, resulting in lower limits of detection as well as improved precision and accuracy. Only Thermo Scientific high-precision hyperbolic quadrupoles can perform H-SRM without any significant loss in transmission. The selectivity provided by H-SRM, followed by quantitation-enhanced data-dependent MS/MS (QED-MS/MS), provides uncompromised quantitative performance at low levels as well as unequivocal structural confirmation.

The TSQ Quantum Access MAX also delivers twice the sensitivity of its predecessor due to the new heated electrospray ionization probe, the HESI-II. A further boost to productivity comes from another new feature – the instrument’s high-speed positive/negative switching at better than 25ms, which enables multi-residue screening in a single analytical run.

TraceFinder Software
TraceFinder’s extensive menu of preconfigured methods and report formats makes screening for routine contaminants a simple process, even for novice users. The software’s simple point-and-click interface prompts the user through the steps to create methods for targeted screening and quantitation: choose the test, build the sample list, choose the report options and submit the samples for analysis. Users access the built-in selective reaction monitoring (SRM) library and choose the liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry conditions to create the desired method. The sample is then analyzed and a report is created based on the selected report template.
TraceFinder also offers improved data security with a rights-based user log-in system that limits access to methods and data. This ensures that data is not compromised and that changes are clearly recorded. TraceFinder supports both English and Chinese languages, and will soon support Japanese.