Chromatography Forum

Hi guys,

I have an issue here. Initially, I had wanted to test for monobutyl tin and dibutyl tin in water using GC-MS. However I had only achieved poor recovery for the spike. I had wanted to use Sodium tetraethyl borate for derivitization as what is stated in Agilent application note but decided to give up due to the safety hazard of the chemical.

I then went online and saw that EPA 8323 has a method for detecting the two compounds in water using electrospray ion mass spectrometry.

However, I will be using LC-MSMS ESI instead. The method stated to use mobile phase solution: 80% methanol/14% water/6% acetic acid/0.1%
tropolone.

Will tropolone do any damage or affect the LC-MSMS ?

Tropolone is not a common mobile phase additive hence I am concerned if it is suitable for use in the LCMSMS.

Thank you to those who have read and those who will reply. =)

From the method introduction:

This method covers the use of solid-phase extraction (SPE) discs, solvent extractions(for biological tissues), and micro-liquid chromatography (μLC) coupled with electrospray ion trap mass spectrometry (ES-ITMS) [this technique would also be applicable to ES-quadrupole mass spectrometry (ES-MS)] for the determination of organotins (as the cation) in waters and biological tissues. The following compounds can be determined by this method:

ESI is Electro Spray Ionization, so it is the same as in the method.

The method is using Ion Trap MS, or alternatively Quadrupole MS (single quad) so doing MSMS should work just fine.

This method is just a single quad method using ESI as the sample ionization method so using ESI-LCMSMS will work the same way.

I don't know anything about Tropolone, but if it works while using Ion Trap or Single Quad MS then it should be no problem for a Triple Quad MSMS.

You probably don't need to use tropolone. For organotin our mobile phase consists of 0.01% formic acid (A) and 0.05% acetic acid in methanol (B). We're using a C18 column.