New Fast, Simple Food Testing Workflow from SCIEX Advances Food Safety Monitoring to Mitigate Risk

MasterView™ Food Testing Software combined with QTRAP^® technology identifies chemical compounds and contaminants with greater confidence, for improved food safety testing in routine laboratories

Framingham, MA — SCIEX, a global leader in analytical technologies, today announced the launch of the MasterView™ Food Testing Workflow for QTRAP^® mass spectrometry systems at the 5^th Annual FERA/JIFSAN Symposium on Emerging Issues in Food, in York, UK. The new workflow will allow routine food testing laboratories to screen, identify and quantify targeted chemical contaminants in food samples, rapidly and with greater confidence than can be achieved using alternative analytical approaches. The improved reliability of the SCIEX workflow can also increase productivity for food testing labs that need to analyze numerous samples for many different targeted compounds to satisfy the demand for increased food safety testing and monitoring.

This new workflow is an expansion to SCIEX's recently launched MasterView^TM Software workflow for TripleTOF^® technology, which simplifies the identification of unexpected contaminants using high resolution mass spectrometry technology. The software application has been designed with built-in automation that quickly turns enormous amounts of complex analytical data into simplified, meaningful answers for truly proactive food screening before an unanticipated incident occurs.

This new MasterView™ Food Testing Workflow for QTRAP^® systems offers food testing labs an incredibly effective and reliable way for labs to identify compounds in their samples. MasterView™ Software propels QTRAP^® technology to a new level of simplicity and productivity, allowing scientists to compare their acquired data to compound libraries and realize better confidence in compound identification than simple MRM ratio analysis using a triple quadrupole mass spectrometry system. This improved confidence in the results produced from every injection will reduce the need for reinjections, and combined with the simplicity of the data processing workflow, thereby increases throughput for testing laboratories.

"The primary benefit of this workflow is the improved confidence and reliability in the results that it provides to food testing labs," said Vincent Paez, Sr. Director, Food & Environmental Markets, SCIEX. "Our initial results have proven that labs can reduce the risks of reporting a false negative or a false positive result when implementing this workflow in place of traditional workflows, such as standard MRM quantitation using ion ratios."

Visitors to the FERA/JIFSAN conference can view demonstrations of the new food testing software on-board SCIEX's Mobile Lab from June 9-11, along with SCIEX's industry leading, high-performance mass spectrometry technologies and solutions for food monitoring, surveillance and safety.

New features of the MasterView™ Food Testing Software

Prior to the availability of MasterView™ Software, lab personnel had to deal with the complexity of large amounts of data, the time-consuming task of manual data review and often expend resources trying to find a technologist highly familiar with mass spectrometry. This has all contributed to slower adoption of mass spec technology for routine food contaminant testing.  However, with this new, intuitive software package from SCIEX, lab personnel can now effectively adopt technology such as the SCIEX QTRAP^® 4500 or 6500 Systems, or the TripleTOF^® 4600 or 5600 Systems, to enhance their food testing with routine workflows that are proven to produce reliable and fast answers.

The benefit of MasterView™ Software is its simplicity and speed. Screening for hundreds of known targeted compounds in many food samples can be done in five mouse clicks, with data processing and results compiling in mere seconds. The software also features a user-friendly interface with colored symbols for more efficient data review, to identify positive findings quickly in large batches of samples. When combined with TripleTOF^® accurate mass LC-MS/MS technology for unknown target surveillance, MasterView™ Software also has the functionality to enable the elimination of irrelevant peaks (such as benign matrix components or healthy compounds typically found in food). It can quickly flag potential hazards as well as provide tools to assist in unknown investigation, to accurately confirm the identity of unknown peaks. When combined with QTRAP^® or TripleTOF^® technology, MasterView&trade Software ultimately enables food testing labs to reduce false positive and false negative findings to improve confidence in their results beyond that which can be achieved by alternative testing approaches.