Agilent Introduces new Mass TOF and Q-TOF LC/MS Systems

Agilent Technologies Inc. has introduced the Agilent 6220 Accurate-Mass time-of-flight (TOF) and 6520 Accurate-Mass quadrupole time-of-flight (Q-TOF) liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (LC/MS) systems, delivering mass accuracy, mass resolution, sensitivity and speed for proteomics, metabolomics, product degradation and other complex experiments.

The company says that the 6220 TOF and 6520 Q-TOF have added proprietary 32 Gbit/second high-speed data acquisition electronics that improve mass resolution to 20,000.

Additionally, these products incorporate proprietary dual-gain analog to digital (ADC) time-of-flight electronics for a tenfold improvement of dynamic range - now approaching up to five orders of magnitude.

“We set out to deliver exceptional analytical performance for MS and MS/MS analyses for experiments demanding the highest accurate-mass measurements, and these two instruments have achieved this,” said Ken Miller, Agilent marketing director, LC/MS Division.

“These improvements will enable scientists in metabolomics, proteomics and complex qualitative analyses to find and identify more lower-abundance compounds faster than ever. All of this performance is achieved without significantly compromising rapid analysis time for higher-quality data.”

The Agilent 6220 TOF incorporates high-speed electronics and ADC TOF technology to deliver the same benefits as when operating in MS/MS mode. Targeted applications include product degradation studies, biomarker discovery, metabolomics and confirmation of compounds in synthetic chemistry labs.

The 6220 TOF now uses the Agilent MassHunter Workstation software with advanced data acquisition and qualitative and quantitative data analysis capabilities. These capabilities include data-mining functionality based on powerful molecular feature extraction and molecular formula generation algorithms, facilitating identification of compounds in complex mixtures.