Drug Screening Using Liquid Chromatography Quadrupole Time-of-Flight (LC-QqTOF) Mass Spectrometry.

Drug screening using high-resolution mass spectrometers, including quadrupole time-of-flight mass analyzers (QqTOFs), is becoming increasingly popular due to the additional flexibility that these instruments offer laboratories. Liquid chromatography (LC) coupled to TOF, as in an LC-QqTOF, offers comparable sensitivity and a shortened method development time relative to triple quadrupole-based mass spectrometry. In addition, LC-QqTOF data that are collected in untargeted mode can be analyzed retrospectively to detect additional compounds that were not predefined targets. Much of the power of LC-QqTOF lies in data processing, and the data analysis workflow that a lab uses must be adequately validated.