Waters Technologies for food safety, food authenticity and biomedical research at ASMS 2018

Waters is giving scientists attending ASMS 2018 a first look at new mass spectrometry technologies developed to serve the multi-faceted analytical requirements of food testing, university and biomedical research laboratories. The new products include a gas chromatography-mass spectrometry/mass spectrometry (GC-MS/MS) system for food safety analyses and a direct-analysis mass spectrometry system for rapid molecular fingerprinting of food commodities, ingredients and processed products. 

Food Safety Analysis – Waters® Xevo™ TQ-GC System

At ASMS Waters will preview its new Xevo TQ-GC mass spectrometer, GC-MS/MS system for food safety and quality laboratories. The system, to be officially launched later in the year, allows laboratories to consistently meet and exceed limits of detection when quantifying pesticides residues and other contaminants in food using GC-MS/MS methods set forth by worldwide regulatory agencies/authorities. Hundreds of pesticides are in use throughout the world, and with other emerging contaminants regularly coming to the attention of regulatory authorities, laboratories need to be able to accurately detect and quantify pesticides in a variety of food types and GC-MS/MS, along with liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS), is the preferred technique of choice for the majority of them.

Food Authenticity and Adulteration – DART QDa with LiveID System

The product of a collaboration between Waters and IonSense™, Inc. (Saugus, Mass.) the Waters™ DART™ QDa™ with LiveID™ System is a direct analysis system for rapid molecular fingerprinting of food commodities, ingredients and processed products. It allows scientists to answer questions such as: Is the sample I’m testing authentic? Has the composition of it changed? Is sample quality good or bad? Featuring the LiveID software platform, the instrument performs real-time sample recognition and verifies sample authenticity or adulteration in seconds.

Direct Analysis in Real Time (DART) is a direct and rapid analysis technique for various sample types with minimal sample preparation and no requirement for a chromatographic separation. The Waters LiveID software trains and validates multivariate statistical models using the chemical profile obtained from the DART QDa analysis. The LiveID models can be used to identify unknown samples, generating easy-to-interpret results in near real time and a simple yes/no answer in seconds.

Educating Tomorrow’s Science Leaders – ACQUITY QDa Practical MS Education Package

The ACQUITY™ QDa Practical MS Education Package, developed jointly with the National Mass Spectrometry Facility at Swansea University in the UK, was created to give university chemistry departments an affordable means to enable undergraduates to access mass spectrometry equipment during their degree schemes and educate them in the fundamentals of mass spectrometry.

Today’s undergraduates can be at a disadvantage since many mass spectrometers at universities are housed in core or specialised facilities, and typically only available to principal investigators (PIs) and their extended teams for use with specific research projects. Rarely are undergraduate students given direct access to the instruments; yet hands-on experience with mass spectrometry and knowledge of the related fundamentals is a valuable asset to college graduates entering today’s workforce.

The Practical MS Education Package comes with everything needed to introduce undergraduates to mass spectrometry including experiments, student and instructor handbooks, instrumentation, software, chemistry standards and multimedia content to enrich the teaching of mass spectrometry fundamentals in the college classroom.

Driving Biomedical Research

In other news, Waters and Elucidata Corporation (Cambridge, Mass. and New Delhi, India) have entered into a co-marketing agreement that combines the Waters Symphony Data Pipeline™ Software with Elucidata’s Polly™ Workflows and cloud applications to enable efficient automated processing and interpretation of metabolic flux analysis studies from Waters mass spectrometry data. Metabolomics flux studies measure the production and consumption rates of metabolites in a biological system.

Waters and Biognosys AG (Schlieren, Switzerland) have expanded their marketing agreement to include Biognosys® Spectronaut Pulsar® X software and the PQ500 Reference peptide kit for the Waters Xevo G2-XS QTOF quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometer running SONAR™ Software, a novel Data Independent Acquisition (DIA) technology. The combined platform quantitates reproducibly a large number of proteins (<500) in 15 minutes with single digit CVs. The platform is well-suited for enabling biomedical research laboratories to rapidly characterise and quantitate the protein profile of large sets of samples in a systematic and standardised way for clinical proteomics research.

Also at ASMS, Waters announced the release of the Targeted Omics Library, including the new MetaboQuan-R™ Method Packages. The Library is a growing repository of downloadable Packages for rapidly expanding the number of analytes a lab can measure while reducing method development time. Each Method Package includes a Quanpedia™ file containing all chromatographic and mass spectrometric settings for “load and go” use on the Waters ACQUITY UPLC™ IClass Plus System and Xevo TQ-S micro triple quadrupole mass spectrometer and comes with an application note for the associated method.

The latest version of Progenesis™ QI software for proteomics, which creates and queries spectral libraries, is now capable of handling data dependent analysis (DDA) data, supporting identifications from all the DDA search engines supported by Progenesis QI for proteomics. It also incorporates a mass spectrometry/mass spectrometry (MS/MS) spectral clean-up tool for cleaner library matching. Progenesis QI for proteomics is an excellent tool for performing host cell protein analysis, where the majority of analytes can be found across multiple experiments. Additionally there is an improved workflow for Waters MS(E) data with automatic peak detection thresholding to maximise the number and quality of identifications, while improving software performance.

Waters Announces Winner of This Year’s ASMS Research Award

This year’s recipient of an ASMS Research Award sponsored by Waters is Dr. James Prell, Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Oregon. The Prell laboratory uses state-of-the-art mass spectrometry and ion mobility techniques to investigate the physical and chemical properties that govern the organisation of macromolecular assemblies at the nanoscale, including those found in biological membranes. 

Waters scientists are giving a total of 12 oral and 76 poster presentations at ASMS 2018. A complete list of them, including poster #MP 034 titled Real-Time Authentication of Food and Beverages Using DART QDa LiveID Analysis, is available here.