GEN-MKT-18-7897-A
Dec 4, 2017 | Blogs, Food / Beverage, Forensic | 0 comments
To date, when it comes to testing urine or oral fluids in the workplace not all psychoactive substances can be detected due to evolving substitutions. As legislation changes, so too do chemical formulations. Therefore researchers, like the authors of the following publication, A Validated Method for the Detection of 32 Bath Salts in Oral Fluids, published by Oxford Academic, analyze compounds using the best available methods so they can cast a wider net.
According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, synthetic cathinones or bath salts, come from the khat plant in East Africa and Saudi Arabia. People use these drugs by accident or because they are less likely to be detected than drugs such as methamphetamine, MDMA, and cocaine. Which is why the more substances detected, the greater value your forensic lab can bring to workplace drug testing.Access the Publication >
While traditional analysis such as ELISA assays does exist to test for this widely used designer drug, there are limitations which the researchers in the tech note point out. Confirming a drug analysis, however, is critical to the integrity of your lab, and this research note offers a validated method using the SCIEX QTRAP® 6500 operated in electrospray positive mode and MultiQuant™ software. Even if you are not an expert, users can process and quantify large batches of data to get clear, reliable results in the least amount of time using the reporting tool.
Why Should Your Lab Use Mass Spec to Test for Cathinones or Bath Salts?
The Take-AwayMass Spectrometry is the solution to address NPS, from the artificial cannabinoids of the JWH family of compounds found in synthetic cannabis (K2/Spice), phenethylamines (with stimulant, entactogenic or hallucinogenic effects, such as PMMA and 2C-I), tryptamines (which have predominantly hallucinogenic effects, such as AMT and 5-MeO-DALT), piperazines (which exhibit predominantly stimulant effects, such as mCPP and BZP), or cathinones.
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.
CE‑SDS remains a cornerstone assay for characterizing fragmentation, aggregation, and product‑related impurities in therapeutic proteins. UV detection has been the long‑standing standard. However, it frequently struggles with baseline noise, limited sensitivity for minor fragments, and subjective integration.
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