What is it about?

We have built a platform which uses an acoustic pulse to fire microdroplets of liquid sample out of a standard microtitre plate, through a charge field into a mass spectrometer. This enables us to load samples at a rate of 10,000 per hour. The samples are ionized using a standard electrospray modality ensuring a wide range of analytes can be ionized.

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Why is it important?

This platform enables very high throughput loading of samples into a standard mass detector. The throughput makes this platform ideal for high-throughput screening. The ability to measure directly the conversion of substrate to product in a label free system offers many advantages including reduction in cost, improved data quality and reduction in screening artefacts. There are a significant number of potential applications for this technology both within and beyond biomedical research.

Perspectives

Mass spectrometry is a widely used technology within drug discovery but has limited throughput. Sample preparation times can take anything from 15 seconds to half an hour, this prevents mass spectrometry form being used within high-throughput screening. The value that acoustics brings is the ability to generate a spray very quickly from very small volumes of material and without physically contacting the sample. So we have the potential for high speed, low volume sampling with no cross contamination.

Dr jonathan wingfield
AstraZeneca plc

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This page is a summary of: Novel Acoustic Loading of a Mass Spectrometer, SLAS TECHNOLOGY, February 2016, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/2211068215619124.
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