This application brief demonstrates a method for detecting common organic acids using a Thermo Scientific™ Dionex™ Integrion™ HPIC™ system with a Thermo Scientific™ Dionex™ IonPac™ AS11-HC-4μm column set and coupled to a Thermo Scientific™ ISQ™ EC single quadrupole mass spectrometer.

ASE is EPA approved under method 3545A. This technique uses high temperatures and pressures to increase the kinetics of the extraction process, thus decreasing the extraction time and solvent consumption. Also, because ASE is automated, it allows unattended extraction of up to 24 samples. In this application note, OCPs are extracted from certified reference material (CRM) BCR 115 (Institute for Reference Materials and Measurement, Geel, Belgium), an animal feed containing certified levels of organochlorine pesticides.

ASE is widely used in the environmental industry to replace time- and solvent-intensive techniques such as Soxhlet and sonication extraction. Many features of the ASE system also make it attractive for use in pharmaceutical laboratories. This Application Note gives two examples of how ASE can provide extraction efficiencies superior to other techniques. In the first example, ASE is used to extract an antischizophrenic agent from rodent feed used in drug testing. In the second example, ASE is used to extract Lasalocid, a veterinary medicinal added to poultry and cattle feed.

Productivity of an LC-MS system is measured in samples per day. Modern ultrahigh pressure LC-MS (UHPLC-MS) methods increasingly deal with very short gradients, leading to chromatographic signals with peak widths below 5 seconds at the base. It is still a challenge for high-resolution, accurate mass (HR/AM) systems to provide a sufficient number of scans (=10) across the chromatographic peak in full scan mode without compromising sensitivity and selectivity. We describe a system that addresses these challenges.

Screening of pesticides, mycotoxins and veterinary drugs is of great importance in regulated environments (e.g. food and animal feed analysis). The use of triple quadrupole MS is popular, but has certain limitations: no post acquisition re-interrogation of data, limited number of compounds per analysis, and no ability to screen for unidentified unknowns. In this work, we show a full scan screening approach using a novel single stage Orbitrap mass spectrometer coupled to U-HPLC, providing high mass accuracy at high resolutions, elemental composition, and resolving co-eluting targets.