Welcome Zoi, to Kruvelab!
Zoi will be with us for 3 months as an Erasmus student from Germany, while helping to find reliable calibration compounds for estimating concentrations for non-target liquid chromatography–high-resolution mass spectrometry (LC/HRMS) in positive mode.
Screening environmental samples for unknown pollutants is often done using liquid chromatography–high-resolution mass spectrometry (LC/HRMS); however, exact amounts of the detected compounds cannot be easily determined. The problem is simple but serious: without reference standards, it’s hard to tell how much of a potentially harmful substance is actually present. Our previous research has shown that one promising solution is to predict how much response a chemical causes in LC/HRMS. This property is known as ionization efficiency, and it can be used to estimate the concentration of previously unidentified chemicals. An in-house developed approach called MS2Quant (Sepman et al. Anal. Chem. 2023) does exactly this; linking instrument signals to predicted ionization behaviour. While the method already works well for LC/HRMS in positive mode, the covered response range needs expanding. This project aims to identify more reliable calibration compounds, including those with lower ionization efficiency, test how stable they are, and ultimately make standard-free chemical quantification robust enough to be used confidently across labs worldwide.
We are looking forward to the nice time together and to how the project will evolve!