Increased efficiency in meeting food safety regulatory requirements by combining UPLC, travelling wave tandem MS and automated quantitation

ANYL 35

Paul Young, paul_young@waters.com, Waters Corporation, Atlas Park, Simonsway, Manchester, United Kingdom and Joe Romano, Joe_Romano@Waters.com, Chemical Analysis, Waters Corporation, Mail Stop: IM, 34 Maple St, Milford, MA 01757.
Increased worldwide emphasis on food safety by consumers, producers and legislative bodies has resulted not only in the need for improved methods of analysis with higher throughput, but also in strict legislative criteria defining the suitability of those methods. Compared with traditional HPLC, UPLC allows the separation and detection of large numbers of analytes with much shorter analysis times. However, UPLC peak widths require very fast cycling and polarity switching from the mass spectrometer to allow sufficient measurements for effective confirmation. This has been achieved through the application of travelling wave technology within the tandem MS collision cell. A method is presented for the confirmation and quantitation of more than thirty steroid hormone related compounds in bovine urine in less than five minutes. A solution is also described for the processing and archiving of the vast quantities of data generated by this technique.