Screening and Individual Quantitative Works of Regulated Substances in Food Using Triple Quadrupole Mass Spectrometer LCMS-8030

Our environment is overflowing with a variety of chemical substances, and the effect of these substances on our health is becoming a matter of worldwide concern. Looking at agrochemicals alone, more than a
thousand different types of compounds are widely used, therefore it is significantly important to develop a screening method capable of analyzing large number of compounds at low concentration levels. The LC/MS/MS is widely employed for the food safety because it features excellent selectivity and sensitivity by using Multiple Reaction Monitoring (MRM). However, it is well-known that the number of
compounds which can be monitored is limited by the length of dwell and pause time because the length of both parameters affects the MRM sensitivity.
The dwell time is the time during which an ion is monitored by the detector in MRM, and the pause time is the time required for MRM switching. Since the dwell time and pause time are parameters which affect the sensitivity of the method as well as the instrument's data sampling rate, the dwell and pause time is a critical parameter in achieving appropriate sensitivity to quantify the regulated substances in a complex food matrix. The LCMS-8030 features extremely fast pause and dwell times of 1 msec.
In this Technical Report, we used the LCMS-8030 triple quadrupole mass spectrometer to evaluate whether or not 10 pesticide compounds used to spike a matrix at 10 ppb each could be detected automatically by using generic peak detection method in the screening for 176 pesticides using 1 msec pause and 5 msec dwell times.