Magritek makes benchtop NMR available for drug analysis in forensic labs
Introducing the qIDsolve benchtop nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) software package
26 Mar 2024
The market-leading benchtop NMR developer, Magritek, introduces its qIDsolve benchtop NMR software package, which is being adopted by forensics laboratories around the world. Developed to meet the needs of regulated environments, the package includes: automated data acquisition, identification, quantification and reporting, embedded in a fully traceable environment that is supported by the most comprehensive benchtop NMR spectra database.
The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) reports about 1 million seizures of illicit drugs annually, the vast majority of which are related to known substances like cannabis, cocaine, and opioids. qIDsolve’s powerful cross-correlation algorithm provides automatic identification of these substances in a sample against the database.
The extensive benchtop NMR spectra database contains 1,500 compounds, collected in cooperation with a number of partners and laboratories around the world during the last 10 years. It is easy to expand and the whole database or defined entries can be easily selected to be shared with other systems.
However, drug enforcement authorities are also tasked with controlling a growing number of synthetic drugs/new psychoactive substances (NPS), for which there are no references in libraries of known substances. For these cases, the system offers a range of advanced methods that help to elucidate the structure. Once the substance is identified it can be added to qIDsolve’s database for routine testing.
NMR spectroscopy is inherently quantitative, therefore there is no need for timely and expensive calibration. The identity and purity of a sample can be determined from one measurement. However, until the development of the current generation of benchtop instruments, the cost and maintenance of a high field NMR system has limited its routine use in forensics. The Magritek Spinsolve benchtop NMR spectrometer overcomes the limitations of high field NMR and is already used in forensics labs around the world.
NMR can enhance the complete analytical suite and be integrated with other spectroscopic techniques which are currently routinely used in forensic labs, namely – infrared (IR) spectroscopy, ultraviolet (UV) spectroscopy and GC/MS.