GEN-MKT-18-7897-A
Jan 1, 2019 | Blogs, Forensic | 0 comments
Against a backdrop of rapid growth, chirality plays a major role in the synthesis of drugs in both pharmaceutical and illicit drug development. In fact, more than half of the drugs currently in use are chiral compounds, available as either racemates or pure enantiomers. With increasing substances of forensic interest falling within this category, chiral analysis is firmly under the forensic microscope.
As a forensic toxicologist, you could be using chiral analysis in biological samples to determine legal or illicit drug consumption. Or perhaps you are working with street samples to link a clandestine lab with their route to market or even environmental samples to identify illicit drug manufacturing locations. Whatever your field, chiral separation of drug enantiomers is essential in order to show that the active enantiomer is, in fact, present in your specimens.
So how do you do your chiral analysis right now and are you using the right technology?
In the past, chiral analysis has combined several processes. It would typically start with drug confirmation by a form of mass spectrometry (capillary electrophoresis CE-MS, gas chromatography GC-MS or liquid chromatography LC-MS) followed by separation of the enantiomers and impurities by a specific chiral separation technique, such as chiral capillary electrophoresis or chiral chromatography. It’s fair to say that this approach can be problematic, would you agree?
We’ve found that direct connection of chiral GC or LC columns with mass spectrometry provides, at best, marginal separation capability. But that’s not all. Neutral or highly sulfated cyclodextrin additives in chromatographic and electro-driven separation modes can cause contamination and ion suppression in the electrospray process. This is far from ideal!
So, you ask, where does CESI-MS come in?
Have you heard of low flow Capillary Electrophoresis Electrospray Interface for Mass Spectrometry (CESI-MS) using a Partial Filling Technique (PFT)? It’s proven to generate chiral separation and produce quantitative data at the sensitivity that forensic toxicologists require for even the most challenging casework.
We put the method to the test in the tech note Chiral Analysis of Methamphetamine and Its Metabolite, Amphetamine in Urine by CESI-MS. This new technique separated the enantiomers of methamphetamine and its metabolite, amphetamine, in a single run, with great sensitivity.
Use the form on the right to download the Forensics Compendium to see the complete method, along with recent advancements developed by the forensics team and how mass spec technology is defining forensics of the future.
The Echo® MS+ system is a novel platform for Acoustic Ejection Mass Spectrometry (AEMS) and combines the speed of acoustic sampling with the selectivity of mass spectrometry. This platform has been designed for high throughput analysis of small and large molecules. The technology combines Acoustic Droplet Ejection (ADE), an Open Port Interface (OPI) and could be coupled with the SCIEX Triple Quad 6500+ system or the ZenoTOF 7600 system.
The Echo® MS+ system comprises of an open-port interface (OPI) and acoustic droplet ejection (ADE) module which could be coupled with a mass spectrometer. The mass spectrometer could either be a SCIEX Triple Quad 6500+ system or the ZenoTOF 7600 system. This non-liquid chromatography based; high-throughput screening platform enables rapid analysis of compounds at speeds of up to 1 sample/second.
The ability to consistently achieve reproducible results on many complex samples across multiple days is critical to a routine clinical laboratory. Laboratories relying on analytical instrumentation require stability and robustness to perform a variety of screening and confirmatory assays with confidence. Liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) has become the preferred analytical method in the clinical laboratory to reliably perform clinical testing as it provides best-in-class performance and reliability for the most challenging assays. LC-MS/MS offers the required levels of sensitivity and specificity for the detection and quantitation of molecules from complex biological samples, helping laboratories deliver highly accurate data for a variety of clinically relevant analytes across a wide range of assays.
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