Researchers at the University of Warwick and spin-out company Verdel Instruments have successfully demonstrated two-dimensional mass spectrometry (2DMS) on a benchtop instrument, making this powerful technique practical and affordable for everyday laboratory use.
Modern mass spectrometry workflows are built to reduce complexity before measurement: chromatography separates, acquisition methods filter, processing pipelines simplify. These steps are essential, but they come at a cost - information is lost, often without the analyst knowing what's missing.
"The field has long recognised the power of 2DMS, but it has simply not been accessible - only the best-funded centres could afford the specialist hardware," said Tim Wilson, CEO of Verdel Instruments. "Our technology makes 2DMS possible on benchtop instruments, which are widely available. Any lab can now access this powerful technique."
In their paper, published in Analytical Chemistry, the Verdel/Warwick team provides the first demonstration of 2DMS on a commercially available quadrupole time-of-flight (Q-TOF) instrument, using an upgrade kit. They call this Q-2DMS and the paper shows how it can be used to obtain high-resolution tandem mass spectrometry data from complex mixtures without the need for chromatographic separation or mass filtering.
The Q-2DMS method works by giving each analyte a unique frequency signature based on its mass-to-charge ratio. When these break apart during analysis, the fragments formed retain this signature, allowing a mathematical decoding process to instantly reveal which fragments came from which analytes.
What would normally be an unusable mess of signals becomes an ordered series of mass spectra similar to those obtained using conventional separation and filtering techniques but now including information that is often lost.
The recently published paper shows that Q-2DMS preserved up to tenfold more usable spectral information when analysing closely related or near-isobaric compounds.
The technique demonstrated in the paper could support work across several research areas, including:
- Healthcare, for faster identification of unexpected drug metabolites, enabling more personalised treatment.
- Environmental safety, as any laboratory can now directly detect emerging contaminants (PFAS) without pre-separation, accelerating water safety monitoring.
- Drug control, for rapid characterisation of novel synthetic drugs and designer compounds.
- Drug development, for discovery of unanticipated reaction products and impurities.
Dr Shum Prakash, Business Development Manager, Warwick Innovations adds: "Years of world-leading research have led to Warwick spin-out Verdel Instruments launching Q-2DMS. It combines high-resolution, easy-to-use readouts with a complete time stamp of each sample, so researchers can revisit the data later without needing the original sample, which may have degraded."
"What excites us most is what we don't yet know," concludes Peter O'Connor, Professor of Chemistry at University of Warwick, and senior author of the paper. "By making this technique accessible, we're enabling scientists worldwide to ask questions they couldn't ask before, and to find answers they weren't necessarily looking for."
