PAL µSPE

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are persistent chemicals used in a large variety of products but posing environmental and health risks. Therefore, with PFAS analysis becoming a pressing environmental and public health concern worldwide, the development of analytical workflows with low detection limits for PFAS analysis have become paramount.

In this product brochure, CTC Analytics demonstrates how PAL Systems are uniquely equipped to address these challenges, offering solutions to automate sample preparation process to reduce errors and improve repeatability, as well as offering PFAS-free products to minimize background contamination for optimal sensitivity and accuracy.

Micro-SPE (μSPE) has emerged as an automated green micromethod for sample preparation and clean-up in various fields such as food safety, proteomics, forensics, and environmental analysis for over a decade. The automation of μSPE sample preparation steps has standardized sorbent materials for extract clean-up across different food commodities, increased sample throughput, and provided potential for offline and online hyphenation with GC-MS, LC-MS, or even IC analysis.

CTC Analytics details the analysis of eleven highly polar pesticides (HPPs), including glyphosate, glufosinate, ethephon, and fosetyl-aluminium, along with their related metabolites, from complex food matrices such as honey and pollen. For the first time, micro-SPE clean-up is introduced for HPPs to address known analytical limitations by removing polar co-extracts through automated clean-up processing of sample extracts.

QuEChERS is a well-established quick, easy, and safe pesticide extraction procedure, and as a result, this technique has become a widely used sample preparation approach in pesticide residue analyses. CTC Analytics presents a fully automated QuEChERS extraction and extract clean-up method for GC-MS and LC-MS analysis. The method utilizes an industry standard robotic x,y,z-sampling system. It describes the analysis of organophosphate pesticides from homogeneous liquid samples, using orange juice as an example. The automated workflow involves extraction with acetonitrile, salting out, and using a µSPE cartridge for matrix clean-up before injection into a GC-MS/MS system.

Micro-SPE (µSPE) has emerged as a micromethod for sample preparation and clean-up in food safety, proteomics, forensic, environmental and analysis. Applications are wide-ranging and cover drugs, environmental contaminants, and, in particular, the QuEChERS extract cleanup in multiresidue pesticide analysis. The automation of the µSPE sample preparation steps led to the desired increase in sample throughput, unification of the used sorbent materials for food commodities, and the potential for the online hyphenation with GC-MS and LC-MS instrumentation. With the increasing demand and the use of automated µSPE workflows on PAL Systems, the requirement for extended functionality evolved due to mechanical and also analytical limitations of the initially employed ITSP micro-SPE cartridge (ITSP Solutions Inc., Hartwell GA, USA). With the new PAL µSPE cartridge CTC Analytics introduced a novel septumless cartridge design dedicated to an extended application range and a reliable high throughput automation. In this poster, the evaluation of the new cartridge design is presented with results for pesticides analysis from leading laboratories.

In this video, CTC Analytics demonstrates the uSPE workflow.

Exploring food safety monitoring, USDA expert, Steve Lehotay, advocates for change, and highlights the need for innovation in current practices to enhance routine analysis