The US Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service has purchased a Waters Acquity TQD system to develop rapid and accurate test methods for screening poultry and beef for drug residues.
The instrument purchased is for the Wyndmoor research laboratory.
Farm-raised poultry and livestock often receive drugs to protect them from disease and promote their growth.
Poultry and livestock that enter the food chain can sometimes contain banned substances or legal drugs at concentrations that exceed maximum allowable levels.
The need to obtain more information from a single injection is underscored by increasing demands on laboratory time and resources for reproducible, highly accurate and precise results on larger numbers of samples.
Analytical methods that employ ultra-performance liquid chromatography (UPLC) coupled with tandem mass spectrometry can screen for more than 100 different drug residues at a time at concentrations of less than 10ng/mL, an improvement in speed, efficiency and sensitivity over the traditional seven-plate bioassay method.
The USDA chose Waters Acquity TQD system based on criteria for a UPLC/MS/MS system with a tandem quadrupole mass spectrometry detector capable of 20 millisecond positive and negative switching, a feature deemed important for multi-analyte detection of both positively and negatively charged compounds in a single analytical run.
Waters Acquity TQD system features the Waters Acquity UPLC system, a tandem quadrupole (TQ) mass detector, Acquity BEH analytical columns, all operated under Waters Masslynx 4.1 mass spectrometry software.
The Masslynx software includes Targetlynx software for targeted analyte quantification and the Quanoptimise feature for automated system optimisation and method development.
This UPLC/MS/MS system operates with 1.7 micron Acquity BEH columns and is a true UPLC system for measuring concentrations of veterinary drug residues, pesticides, and other contaminants in foods and beverages.
