Mass Spectrometry

Biography

Biography: Fernando Ramos

Abstract

In the last decades, Food Safety became one of the most important subjects worldwide for many important international organizations including, as well known, the European Commission. To protect consumers, from the health risks associated with the presence of residues of veterinary drugs in food products of animal origin, the European regulatory agencies settled official documents to keep these substances and their administration under control. To perform such control, sensitive and specific analytical methodologies are requested for the determination of veterinary drug residues in food, of animal origin, destined to human consumption. The most efficient analytical technology used in this field is liquid or gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometer detector. The mandatory European Commission criteria, for quantitative and confirmatory determinations in veterinary drug analysis, are the main reason why the triple quadrupole mass spectrometer detector is still the principal analytical tool of choice. Those equipments guarantee an unequivocal identification of trace concentrations in complex matrixes such as biological samples (foodstuff as muscle, eggs, milk, liver, fat and kidney). Such mass spectrometry detectors coupled with liquid chromatography (LC-MS/MS) is a powerful tool allowing multi-compound detection by recording full mass spectra (scan mode), selected ion monitoring (SIM) and multiple reaction monitoring (MRM). More recently, it started to grow the application High Resolution Mass Spectrometry (HR-MS), as Time-of-Flight (ToF) or Orbitrap-MS, in residues analysis but the high cost associated with those equipments along with the fact that it is not completely clear how to apply the performance and validation criteria in those methods, according to legislation, are the main drawback for their use.