Waters Acquity

[James Hillis]

Dear all, has anyone had a play with the Waters Acquity UPLC system. I am very keen to introduce this front-end system into our lab but there is one major problem. Waters want to sell it with their Micromass mass-specs. Consequently the Acquity cannot be controlled through the Sciex Analyst software. As we use Sciex instruments, this presents a major barrier.

Has anyone tried to link an Acquity with a Sciex? If so, please could you tell me of your experiences?


Thank-you

James

[MG]

I would be surprised if this is true. Analyst can control many different brands of pumps and autosamplers etc. If it is true that Waters is preventing Applied Biosystems from writing drivers for the Acquity systems, then it is Waters' loss. I'm sure there are many Analyst / Sciex mass spec users who would be interested in this capability.

[James Hillis]

MG. I am familiar with the various external controllers offered within Analyst. This is correct, I have spoken to a Sales Rep. from Waters and they have no plans to enable the linking of the Acquity to non-Waters detectors. I can understand their reasons for this but I agree with you that it is Waters loss. I think that the Acquity would have to be controlled from a different PC to the MS and a TTL-Sync signal used for communications. My experience of these 'home-made' solution is that they can be a bit flimsy.

[MG]

I guess either that or find another vendor who sells ultra-high pressure LC's. Too bad.

The homemade solution doesn't have to be flimsy though, as long as you test it and work out all the timing issues. I once built a system out of four independently running components, communicating via a homebuilt logic & timing circuit, and ran it up to 24hrs unattended. It was certainly not as easy to setup methods, though.

[Kostas Petritis]

I guess that eventually Waters will allow their instruments to be coupled with other mass spectrometers, especially when other instrument manufacturers will introduce ultra high pressure pumps.

Actually, we are already there, as Jasco introduced a UPLC (they call it XS) which is able to go up to 15000 psi, all along with their sub 2um particle size reversed phase materials...

[Uwe Neue]

Just to be clear: nobody is preventing anybody from writing drivers. The ACQUITY UPLC system is a brandnew systems, and drivers grow slower than apples on trees, especially if the fertilizer still appears to be rather thin.

Don't forget that to take full advantage of an AQUITY system, you need high-speed data acquisition and low extra-column bandspreading. These things do not come automatically with mixed-vendor systems.

[MG]

Thanks for the clarification, Uwe.