Innovative approach to Mass Spectrometry to provide high speed analysis and high quality of data to the Food Safety and Pharmaceutical industries

华威大学的衍生公司Verdel Instruments Ltd正在开发一项创新技术，这项技术将使科学家能够利用这项名为二维质谱(2DMS)的新技术同时获得数千种分子化合物的详细结构信息。2DMS允许用户同时分割各种分子，同时跟踪哪些碎片来自哪些前体分子。有效地，我们能够一次对所有化合物并行进行这些碎片研究，而不是一次对一种化合物进行连续研究，这大大加快了实验速度。虽然该技术的第一个版本是在非常先进的质谱仪上开发的，仅在学术界使用，但我们现在已经开发出一种适合于常规台式质谱仪的方法，该方法将足够快，在几秒钟内提供这些全面的碎片数据集，并且足够快，足以与色谱技术兼容。食品安全和制药行业使用质谱学和类似的碎片研究，常规地识别其配方中的分子，检测潜在的有害污染物，并对重要化合物进行量化。我们新的2DMS技术将极大地提高这类分析的数据质量和速度。这个项目将主要是在食品安全和制药行业的一系列样本上测试我们的新方法。这个创新英国项目的总体目标是定量地确定这项技术将如何、在哪里以及在多大程度上造福于这些行业。

Verdel Instruments Ltd, a spin out company from the University of Warwick, is developing an innovative technology which will allow scientists to obtain detailed structural information for thousands of molecular compounds simultaneously using the new technique called two-dimensional mass spectrometry (2DMS). 2DMS allows a user to fragment a wide range of molecules simultaneously and, at the same time, keep track of which fragments come from which precursor molecules. Effectively, we are able to perform these fragmentation studies in parallel on all compounds at once, rather than serially, with one compound at a time, which greatly speeds up the experiment. While the first versions of the technology were developed on very advanced mass spectrometers and have only been used in academia, we now have developed an approach which is suitable for routine, benchtop mass spectrometers which will be fast enough to provide these comprehensive fragmentation datasets in a few seconds and fast enough to be compatible with chromatographic techniques.The food safety and pharmaceutical industries use mass spectrometry, and similar fragmentation studies, routinely to identify the molecules in their formulations, detect potentially harmful contaminants, and to quantify important compounds. Our new 2DMS technology will greatly improve the data quality and speed for those kinds of analysis. This project will be primarily about testing out our new methodology on a range of samples from the food safety and pharmaceutical industries. The overall goal of this Innovate UK project is to quantitatively determine how, where, and how much this technology will benefit those industries.