Evaporative Sample Preparation for Mass Spectrometry

Genevac has established a new web page that brings together customer technical articles that illustrate how centrifugal evaporation has become a sample preparation technique of choice for laboratories that seek to analyse complex samples using hyphenated mass spectrometry [MS] techniques.

Many laboratories still rely upon the use of a rotary evaporator to perform the evaporation part of their sample preparation protocol prior to LC-MS or GC-MS analysis. While rotary evaporator methods often give good recoveries, they can only handle a single sample, require continuous monitoring to control the process and to ensure that no foaming or bumping occurs. 

For labs involved with GC-MS or LC-MS – Genevac SampleGenie™ technology in conjunction with a Rocket Synergy, HT or EZ-2 series evaporator is enabling large sample volumes to be dried directly into vials eliminating several time-consuming sample handling steps and the attendant risk of errors. SampleGenie is proven to reduce evaporation times by up to 66%, is compatible with a wide range of HPLC, GC and storage vial sizes and is a proven methodology for environmental analysis, metabolism and toxicology studies, food and beverage research, drugs of abuse testing as well as post purification protocols in life science research. 

Environmental analysis of persistent organic pollutants (POPs), glyphosphates and agal toxins are today a critical requirement in monitoring the quality of municipal water supplies. A paper is available for download that describes how a direct evaporative method developed to replace a solid phase extraction sample preparation technique that has traditionally been used prior to     LC-MS-MS analysis of algal toxins in lake water. The authors demonstrate how the direct evaporation sample preparation technique offers distinct advantages over solid phase extraction by eliminating the sample clean-up step, improving reproducibility, decreasing analysis time, minimising waste generation and being more cost effective.

MALDI-TOF Mass Spectrometry is a widely accepted technique for the elucidation and quantitation of biomolecules in life science research. However concentrating oligonucleotides, proteins, antibodies and other large biomolecules prior to analysis is not straightforward. A paper is available for download that describes how Genevac centrifugal evaporators have been able to protect these sensitive samples from thermal degradation and by preventing cross contamination between different samples in a microplate.