Specht Laboratories has recently purchased a third LC/MS/MS system to analyse pesticide residues for the food industry
Specht Laboratories has recently purchased an API 4000 LC/MS/MS system to work alongside two existing API 2000 LC/MS/MS systems used to analyse pesticide residues for the food industry.
Thomas Anspach, senior scientist at Specht, explained: "Many of our customers, especially those who are suppliers or manufacturers of baby food, have very strict quality control protocols and we provide them with a comprehensive quality assurance service. "Apart from the work with pesticide residues, we analyse several products for mycotoxins and, for customers in the agrochemical industry, we validate new method protocols for pesticide registration according to the GLP regulations. "Overall, our sample numbers have increased in the last few years by almost 100% a year and, because of European regulations, we expect this increase to continue.
"Our work is relatively labour intensive - cutting samples, homogenising, extracting and summary clean-ups - and we realised that switching to LC/MS/MS methods would reduce the number of clean-ups required.
"Both of the LC/MS/MS analyser models we use are very rugged and allow us to inject crude sample extracts continuously over several months without having to completely clean the instrument. "We chose the API 2000 system because it offered a good balance between cost and sensitivity and later decided to purchase an API 4000 system to overcome the matrix effects inherent in some of the samples we analyse.
"This instrument is much more sensitive and allows us to dilute the samples down to 1 in 10 or 1 in 50 to overcome these effects.
"Our relationship with Applied Biosystems personnel - with technicians, service people and the application chemists in Darmstadt - is excellent and another significant factor that makes us choose its instruments."
