Agilent Announces Recipients of its Latest Thought Leader Award

Agilent Technologies Inc. has announced the recipients of its latest Thought Leader award: Dr. Jens Frisvad and the Center for Microbial Biotechnology in the Department of Systems Biology at the Technical University of Denmark.

With this award, Agilent is contributing measurement solutions and expertise to support research in food safety, specifically the metabolomics of mycotoxins (toxins made by mold).

The Center for Microbial Biotechnology is working to create a targeted metabolomics approach for thousands of compounds produced by Aspergillus, Penicillium and Fusarium - filamentous molds that frequently contaminate food and can lead to illness.

As a key aspect of the research, scientists will use mutable internal standards to calibrate changes in both chromatographic retention and mass-spec sensitivity in order to compare extracts over many years.

The Agilent Thought Leader Award will provide the lab with use of a LC-QTOF system for discovery metabolomics, as well as a LC-QQQ system for target screening.

“Our research is aimed at showing the impact that analysis of LC-QTOF and LC-QQQ data can have on understanding the metabolomics of mycotoxins,” said Dr. Frisvad. “We are extremely pleased that Agilent is helping us continue this important food-safety research.”

“Our support of the work being done at the Center for Microbial Biotechnology closely aligns with a major initiative at Agilent: providing tools and methods that help test the global food supply,” said Mike McMullen, president of Agilent’s Chemical Analysis Group.

McMullen continued, “By providing instruments to Dr. Frisvad and his team, we continue Agilent’s long history of helping create innovative ways to improve food safety.”

The Center for Microbial Biotechnology also plans to use the Agilent LC-QTOF and LC-QQQ to continue collaborative projects to study pathogenic fish bacteria, as well as measuring mycotoxins in air and possibly human blood.