to at least introduce products which may not necessarily be new to the market but would be to many customers.
The exhibition area was spread over two floors with all the big manufactures being housed in the main area as no restrictions were placed on booth size although hospitality suites were encouraged fort he first time at this event. Certain booths decided to offer happy hour events to boost traffic and since Bremen is the home to the famous Becks brewery this generally went down well.
Space constraints prevent reviewing of all the booths offerings so I have tried to summarise some of the more interesting offerings on show. For more information on many products readers should refer to the pages following this article and also visit the websites
www.Labmate-online.com and
www.imsc-bremen-2009.de where more information may be found.
One of the major talking points around the IMSC exhibition was the news that the Applied Biosystems / MDS Analytical Technologies joint venture had been purchased by Danaher Corporation, a name not associated at all with Mass Spectrometry yet a cash rich company. The ABI/MDS product line ranging from triple quadrupole mass spectrometers to innovative hybrid triple quadrupole-linear ion trap systems is amongst the market leaders so interesting times lie ahead.
INSTRUMENTATION
Most manufacturers have their product offering designed to appeal to scientists who have specific requirements from their systems beit resolution, sensitivity, high mass accuracy, speed, quantification, qualification, ionisation mode, type of measurement or any combination of these, the permutations are almost endless. Where there is room for differentiation from company to company is in systems combining focus on more than one criterion from the preceding list possibly aimed at specific markets, eg. metabolomics, clinical, proteomics.
Some of the major ‘names’ in the Mass Spectrometry Instrument business are now offering a potentially new
exciting series of ‘hybrid’ mass spectrometers. New improved versions featuring the latest technologies were on offer from most of the major manufacturers with Waters heavily promoting their SYNAPTTM
G2 series along with no less than eight
enhancements to their Mass Lynx software suite, Thermo Scientific launched their LTQ Velos and LTQ Orbitrap VelosTM
instruments aimed at producing faster
analysis speeds and ultra-high resolution and accurate mass data than had previously been attainable. Agilent Technologies launched the model 6540 QTOF instrument as part of an LC/MS/MS product line alongside their model 1290 LC System which was heavily promoted at IMSC along with its ability to interface with the increasing range of mass specs that the company offers. AB SCIEX have the AB SCIEX QTRAP 5500 LC/MS/MS combined with Linear Ion Trap technology, Bruker Daltronics have the solariX Qq-FTMS and. Shimadzu offer the LC/MS-IT-TOF combining ion trap and TOF capabilities and the features and benefits associated with both.
SOFTWARE
Complex and copious amounts of data is often produced with MS systems and although all Instrument manufacturers have their own suite offerings, some scientists prefer to use dedicated software for their particular situation and several were on show. Medicwave for example offer a suite dedicated to finding protein biomarkers and detecting protein deviations. ACD /Labs were demonstrating their IntelliTarget software for determining the presence of known compounds in LC and GC/MS analyses.
COMPONENT ‘ADD-ONS’
Parker and Peak Scientific Instrument exhibited a range of gas generators and a company named MS NOISE offered a range of noise reduction boxes for use with vacuum pumps which naturally no MS system can run without.
DEDICATED APPLICATIONS SYSTEMS An interesting approach was taken by PerkinElmer
May 23-27th 2010 Salt Lake City, Utah June 5-9th
2011 Denver, Colorado May 20-24th 2012 Vancouver, BC, Canada
The next meeting, the 19th, of the IMSC will be held for the first time outside of Europe in 2012 in Kyoto, Japan (September 15-21) under the organisation of the Mass Spectrometry Society of Japan, MSSJ. For further information please go to
www.imsc2012.jp
who at IMSC launched a dedicated system aimed at the clinical market with their steroid profiling system based on an LC-MS/MS platform. Consumables and software were included as part of the system. Possibly more dedicated systems could be the future route into the clinical market for manufacturers.
CONSUMABLES AND 3RD SALES/SERVICE
PARTY
Economic issues within many companies has meant good times for 3rd party service organisations many of which also offer refurbished equipment with upgrades and much of it is fairly recent issue. Many pharmaceutical companies are down sizing and relocating their R+D efforts meaning top end spec machines are available at interesting prices. Kinesis RSS, along with an increasing number are amongst the companies who offer nearly new and refurbished Instruments
Many members of long standing in the Mass Spec community at both the end user and commercial orientation will have been occasional visitors to the annual ASMS event over the years. They will no doubt have noted that this ISMC was starting to incorporate some of that meetings organisational feature such as on-site hospitality suites and a closer working relationship with the sponsors who hopefully will allow the costs of attendance and appeal of the meeting to continue to grow if deemed a success on this occasion.
FOLLOW THAT
Dates and venues for the forthcoming ASMS meetings have been announced as follows:
Rapid and Convenient Substance Extractions Directly into MS
The new Camag TLC-MS Interface is a versatile instrument for extracting compounds from a TLC/HPTLC plate and feeding them into a mass spectrometer for substance identification or structure elucidation.
Surveys have shown that not all samples can be processed by HPLC-MS or HPLC-DAD systems alone - due to no or low detection of the compounds or impurities in the UV range, a heavy matrix load, or a lack of MS compatibility with the solvents that are necessary for the HPLC separation. In such cases the addition of TLC/HPTLC to the system may be the ideal solution. In the past unknown substances were scraped off the TLC/HPTLC plate, eluted into a tube and transferred into the MS. Now a convenient and universal TLC-MS Interface is available which can semi-automatically extract zones of interest and direct them online into a HPLC-MS system.
The device can be connected to any brand of LC-coupled mass spectrometer. The semi-automatic TLC-MS Interface is quickly and easily connected (by two fittings) to any LC-coupled MS without adjustments or mass spectrometer modifications. In lieu of plate scraping Substances of interest are extracted directly from a TLC/HPTLC then pumped into the MS, producing within a minute sensitive MS signals per substance zone. The interface extracts the complete substance zone with its depth profile, allowing detections comparable to HPLC down to the pg/zone range.
Circle no. 344
Mass Spec Co-Market Agreement Cerno Bioscience and Agilent Technologies, Inc announced that they will jointly market Cerno’s MassWorksTM
calibration software to Agilent gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer
(GC/MSD) ChemStation users. This novel calibration increases the mass accuracy of Agilent’s single quadrupole GC/MSD sufficiently to identify unknown compounds. This normally requires use of much more expensive, larger instruments such as Time-of-Flight, or Fourier Transform Ion Cyclotron Resonance mass spectrometers.
MassWorks for GC/MSD uses Cerno’s patented technology to calibrate raw MS data from Agilent’s GC/MSD using, peak shape, followed by CLIPSTM formula ID based on spectral accuracy.
This technique dramatically improves mass accuracy and enables single quad instruments to identify unknown compounds. In addition to enabling compound identification without a library, the formula ID function also adds confidence to library searches. The combined capabilities of the Agilent GC/MSD ChemStation and Cerno’s MassWorks means there is now an economic alternative to high-resolution GC/MS systems for formula ID.
”The combination of Agilent’s GC/MS with Cerno’s MassWorksTM holds real value for end users," said Chris Toney, Agilent Vice President and General Manager, Mass Spec Systems. “Customers can use their workhorse single quad instruments to identify unknowns rather than rely on more specialised instruments with associated costs and delays.”
"We’re delighted to enter into this relationship with Agilent, a recognised market leader in GC/MS. With Agilent’s large installed base and worldwide reach, we will be able to make MassWorksTM
laboratories.” MassWorksTM
is compatible with Agilent 5975 and 5973 GC/MS instruments running Agilent MSD ChemStation software. Circle no. 345
available to many more users. Our customer base continues to grow and this partnership will only accelerate that process” said Dr Yongdong Wang, Founder and President of Cerno Bioscience. “By configuring and pricing MassWorksTM specifically for the GC/MS market, called MassWorksTM
for GC/MS, we can make this solution more attractive for all GC/MS
Mass Spectroscopy Focus
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