The identification of nontargeted species in environmental and commercial samples by mass spectrometry can be very difficult. In this article, authors from Eastman Chemical Company describe their systematic approach for the identification of nontargeted species using nominal and accurate mass data, searching both mass spectral and "spectra-less" databases.
Organic mass spectrometry (MS) has witnessed an extraordinary increase in capabilities this past decade because of major advances in ionization sources, analyzers, detectors, chromatography, and computer technology. Many of these technological advances focus on biological applications, a fact plainly evident to attendees of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry's (ASMS) annual conferences. Yet the significance of this ever-sophisticated technology has not been lost on industrial, environmental, and forensic mass spectrometrists, whose work involves characterizing commercial chemical products.
Eastman Chemical Company is a global manufacturer of polymers, fibers, coatings, additives, solvents, adhesives, and many other products. Gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS) and liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC–MS) have proven to be essential for characterizing our company's products and those of other companies. With reasonable effort, we routinely and reliably obtain mass spectral data from these highly sensitive and yet robust techniques. However, unless the data can be converted into structural information, it is not useful as a knowledge base to resolve the analytical problem at hand.
Computer-Searchable Mass Spectral Databases
The results of the EI mass spectral searches are normally more successful than CID searches for two reasons. First, the number of entries in EI databases for GC–MS is approximately 10 times larger than that for CID databases for LC–MS. Second, 70-eV EI spectra are much more reproducible than CID spectra, which can vary significantly depending on instrument design and user-specified variables (3).