GEN-MKT-18-7897-A
Aug 9, 2017 | Blogs, Food / Beverage | 0 comments
News agencies all over the world are reporting a new food contamination issue regarding eggs which have been found to contain residues of Fipronil. According to Nieuwsuur, a Dutch news, and current affairs program, “The Fipronil scandal is a huge blow to the poultry sector. Millions of eggs are destroyed and 138 companies remain tentatively closed. But supermarkets also face great damage. In recent days all contaminated eggs have been taken out of the shelves.” CBS news has reported that contaminated eggs have been discovered in Belgium and in the Netherlands with other European countries now on alert.
Fipronil is an insecticide which belongs to the phenylpyrazole chemical family, it is used in the application of flea, cockroach and ant control. It is the main active ingredient in many flea prevention pet care products. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has classed Fipronil as class II moderately hazardous pesticide.
According to the Food Standards Agency (non-ministerial government department of the Government of the United Kingdom), Fipronil has been used inappropriately in the cleaning of products used in the farming process on chicken farms. Furthermore, it states that Fipronil is not authorized for the use as a veterinary medicine or pesticide around food producing animals.
The detection of Fipronil in food products can quickly and accurately be achieved using the Mass Spectrometry solutions from SCIEX, showcased in a recent webinar on the Validating the Routine Use of High-Resolution Q-TOF LC-MS/MS for the Analysis of Pesticides in Baby Food”. The unique feature of this workflow is that the data was acquired using SWATH® Acquisition.
Why is SWATH so important? Well, the answer is that SWATH scans for all detectable analytes within a sample. Therefore in the analysis of eggs, if you were running a SWATH workflow even if you were not intentionally analyzing for Fipronil, you would still detect it and other potential compounds present which may have been omitted from your targeted workflow.Watch the webinar on how Fipronil and other pesticides are detected using the X500R >
You may also be interested in this vast high-resolution accurate library of pesticide analytes which includes accurate mass spectra for Fipronil and hundreds of other pesticides, you can also download a free MS XIC list here.
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As an analytical strategy, middle-down mass spectrometry (MS) workflows characterize biotherapeutic proteins by analyzing large, digested protein fragments or defined subunits, rather than fully intact proteins (top-down) or digested peptides (bottom-up). A middle-down strategy combines the strengths of top-down and bottom-up approaches by delivering high sequence coverage and structural specificity while maintaining relatively simple sample preparation. In practice, middle-down analysis enables accurate mass measurement, rapid sequence confirmation, and localization of key post-translational modifications (PTMs) on protein subunits that are directly relevant to product quality.
In biopharmaceutical development, sequence variants (SV) are considered an inherent risk of producing complex proteins in living systems. Sequence variants are unintended changes to the amino acid sequence of a biotherapeutic and can be caused by errors in transcription or translation in the host cell, or cell culture and process conditions. Detailed analysis of SVs is important in process and product development to ensure the drug’s safety and efficacy. Even low‑level sequence variants can have significant implications for product quality, safety, and efficacy, making their accurate detection and characterization a critical requirement across development, process optimization, and regulatory submission.
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