This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will lead to a new technology for analyzing contaminants in food substances. This is an extremely challenging analytical problem due to the vast range of contaminants that need to be screened and the complex and varied matrices of different food commodities. The state-of-the-art in analysis is based on electrospray ionization (ESI) and liquid chromatography mass spectrometry (LC-MS). Unfortunately for environmental and biological samples ESI suffers several limitations including matrix ion suppression, poor dynamic range, and inability to ionize nonpolar compounds. We will significantly improve on the analytical accuracy of food contaminants by implementing atmospheric pressure photoionization (APPI), which allows much better control of the undesirable ion-molecule chemistry that plagues ESI. We will test combined ESI/APPI configurations and modes of operation and achieve critical control of ion-molecule interactions from dual ionization. A total system approach will be investigated to develop the optimum technology solution.
The broader/commercial impacts of this research are: (i) significantly improved analysis of harmful compounds in foods providing significant societal benefit in terms of health, well being, and lower healthcare costs, (ii) significant new revenue to Syagen through increased sales off APPI-based products, (iii) improve the technical competitiveness of the U.S. in food safety for which Europe currently leads, and (iv) increase the value proposition for expensive analytical instrumentation by improving the quality and speed of chemical analyses.
The problem of contamination in food commodities, both chemical and biological, has huge economic ramifications in the U.S. and the rest of the world. Ensuring the safety of the most basic staple of the world’s population is of enormous importance. The U.S. expends well over a $1B a year for screening and analysis of food products. The concern for food safety continues to grow due to new regulations, enforcement of trade agreements, and concerns over chemical contamination in imported products (e.g., melamine in flour products and diethylene glycol in toothpaste to name some recent incidences). For chemical screening (e.g., contaminations from pesticides, toxins, environmental hazards etc.), the U.S. expends about $100-200M per year for capital equipment and $500-1,000M for all other costs (maintenance, consumables, labor, overhead, etc.). The leading chemical analysis technology is liquid chromatography / mass spectrometry (LC/MS) considered to be the most sensitive and accurate of all options. Still the need to screen for hundreds of potential toxins in minute quantities creates a huge challenge for the current state-of-the-art in LC/MS. A primary shortcoming is the method of ionizing molecules that is the necessary for MS analysis. The current method of electrospray ionization (ESI) is excellent for some compounds, but very poor for other compounds. We have developed atmospheric pressure photoionization (APPI) that is excellent at ionizing the very compounds that ESI is poor at (i.e., non-polar compounds). The two ionization sources are therefore very complementary. In this work we demonstrated the utility of APPI for food safety contaminants such as pesticides. Furthermore we developed new advanced technologies for operating dual ESI/APPI sources and also developed detection algorithms that enable the switching of ionization sources at the moment that particular compounds are coming off the LC separation component. This work was very successful and already we are working with several prominent food safety laboratories such as the California Department of Food and Agriculture as well as major LC/MS manufacturers.
