No more queues for LC/MS

A team of scientists has optimised an LC/MS system to make full use of the mass spectrometer when connected to any number of LC units, using a unique parallel staggered setup. With the current multiplexed systems that have been reported to date, the mass spectrometer duty cycle has not been fully utilised, so maximum throughput was not achieved, say Shu Li and colleagues from the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, Cambridge, MA. Their new arrangement allows the scalable, on-demand multiplexing of the mass spectrometer and is described in the Journal of Mass Spectrometry.

A total of eight LC units were connected to the mass spectrometer to demonstrate the feasibility of the system, all running the same elution program. This means that the elution time for the target analyte is the same in each LC system so that the position of the observation window can be fixed. Very few steps need to be carried out to transfer an existing LC/MS method to the parallel system. It has already been used for a large number biochemical assays in the drug discovery program.

The new set up "will have significant implications to applications such as high-throughput enzymatic screening and biomarker monitoring, where current throughput presents a major limitation," says Li.