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Mass spec technology advances forensic science

An Applied Biosystems product story
Edited by the Laboratorytalk editorial team Apr 17, 2007

Scientists from Mass Spec Analytical, UK, a specialist in trace analysis for forensic cases, have developed Scentinel, a mobile detection system that can identify compounds at sub-nanogram levels

The Scentinel system will make it quicker and easier for forensic scientists to prove the existence of specific compounds on crime scene samples, providing more reliable evidence for casework studies and helping to solve more crimes.

Scentinel is based on Applied Biosystems/MDS Sciex's highly sensitive tandem mass spectrometer, the API 2000 system, and has been developed for the detection of trace amounts of drugs of abuse and other substances, including explosives.

Simplification of the assays with the front-end ionisation sources and mass spectrometry systems from Applied Biosystems/MDS Sciex has drastically reduced the risk of contamination, which is always a major problem in the analysis of minute amounts of any substance, including drugs of abuse.

To date, Mass Spec Analytical has used the methodology to provide evidence for more than five thousand forensic cases, detecting tiny amounts of drugs or explosives on bank notes, vehicles, packages, clothing and paperwork, for customs, police and other similar agencies and, more recently, for analysing tickets and boarding passes at airports.

Such is the sensitivity of the technology that it can successfully detect even the tiniest residual traces transferred to a boarding pass from the fingers of somebody who has handled explosives.

The method is fast, analysing a thousand tickets an hour, and simple, providing instant yes/no results that do not require special expertise or complicated analysis.

Richard Sleeman, technical director at Mass Spec Analytical, said of the system: "The levels of sensitivity we are able to work with allow us to analyse just about everything.

"For all practical purposes it is totally reliable, so we are very confident that if we say a particular material is there, it really is".

"The strength and breadth of our range of triple quadrupole mass spectrometer systems brings our technology closer to an increased area of applications," said Lars Holmkvist, Applied Biosystems president for Europe.

"We expect the work undertaken by Mass Spec Analytical and other pioneers in the area of biosecurity testing will lead to the creation of additional field-deployable MS devices targeted at the detection of very specific chemical or biological threats".

MS/MS has become the analytical method of choice in the pharmaceutical and environmental industries and is well established in the field of forensic analysis.

Its greatest assets are excellent sensitivity and selectivity and real time analysis without sample preparation.

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