a place to discuss and share new ideas within the field of metabolomics
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Q-TOF
Has anybody (a lucky guy!) tested on a regular basis different Q-TOF instruments for metabolomics applications? what's your experience with any of these instruments: SYNAPT G2, maXis, 6540 UHD and TripleTOF 5600?
Hey Oscar, Of course I will have to start by saying I have no commercial interest in any of these vendors. But I am currently looking at ToF based instruments for metabolomics applications. I just came back from ASMS, and had a chance to discuss these systems with the vendors. I have also demo'ed a few here and couple you haven't listed.
The first one is the Agilent 6540 (soon to release is 6550) qToF MS, it definitely is one of the better systems. Also the dynamic range, and mass sensitivity performance is actually what they market (2ppm mass accuracy). The lock mass calibration is very clean and drifted only slightly (around 0.0003 amu) during the demo. The mass hunter software though was pretty substandard, when it comes to metabolomic applications you have to use there Mass Profiler Professional software which was built from there GeneSpring genomics package. For untargeted metabolomics application, the addition of data dependent MS/MS is also a useful feature.
Another nice system is the LECO LC-HRT MS Citius. LECO is a relatively quiet company in the area of LC based metabolomics, there speciality is GC based metabolomics. They recently came out with this system, to compete with many of the qToF MS systems out there. The LECO LC-HRT though doesn't have MS/MS capability so its not quite the same, but its spectra speed is one of the highest in the industry. So if you can get enough spectral resolution and exact mass points across a peak it might help in compound identification. Also you could use in source CID, but as you may know its hard to control and is highly variable compared to true MS/MS. The other thing is that there software ChromaToF-HRT is one of the best for metabolomic applications. They include a nice peak deconvolution, and alignment algorithms. Also they generate simple peak tables for downstream processing. I personally use MATLAB for that work.
Hope this was useful. I have worked with other ToF based systems so if you would like to expand on any of these let me know.
Hey Oscar,
ReplyDeleteOf course I will have to start by saying I have no commercial interest in any of these vendors. But I am currently looking at ToF based instruments for metabolomics applications. I just came back from ASMS, and had a chance to discuss these systems with the vendors. I have also demo'ed a few here and couple you haven't listed.
The first one is the Agilent 6540 (soon to release is 6550) qToF MS, it definitely is one of the better systems. Also the dynamic range, and mass sensitivity performance is actually what they market (2ppm mass accuracy). The lock mass calibration is very clean and drifted only slightly (around 0.0003 amu) during the demo. The mass hunter software though was pretty substandard, when it comes to metabolomic applications you have to use there Mass Profiler Professional software which was built from there GeneSpring genomics package. For untargeted metabolomics application, the addition of data dependent MS/MS is also a useful feature.
Another nice system is the LECO LC-HRT MS Citius. LECO is a relatively quiet company in the area of LC based metabolomics, there speciality is GC based metabolomics. They recently came out with this system, to compete with many of the qToF MS systems out there. The LECO LC-HRT though doesn't have MS/MS capability so its not quite the same, but its spectra speed is one of the highest in the industry. So if you can get enough spectral resolution and exact mass points across a peak it might help in compound identification. Also you could use in source CID, but as you may know its hard to control and is highly variable compared to true MS/MS. The other thing is that there software ChromaToF-HRT is one of the best for metabolomic applications. They include a nice peak deconvolution, and alignment algorithms. Also they generate simple peak tables for downstream processing. I personally use MATLAB for that work.
Hope this was useful. I have worked with other ToF based systems so if you would like to expand on any of these let me know.