Chromatography Forum

Dear friends,

My lab are going to buy an LC-MS/MS very soon. We want a versatile system for proteomics and natural products (phytoalexins, polyphenols, methylxanthines, etc.) identifcation and quantification. We already heard presentations from these manufacturers:

1. Applied Biossytem: recommended model 3200 (or 4000) Q-Trap LC-MS/MS

2. Agilent: recommended model 6510 quadrupole TOF LC/MS or 6410 Triple quadrupole LC/MS

3. Waters: recommended model micromass Q-TOF Micro (or premier)

4. Finnigan: recommended model LCX Ion trap

We dont have any experience on LC-MS/MS. Our budget is around USD350,000.

I'm greatly appreciate on any advice. Thank you in advance.

This is a link to a great article on how to best evaluate any new purchase. The article is on page 10.
http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/advanst ... olumn0106/

you can buy waters Q-Tof micro with thier ultra performance liquid chromatography system as front end. they have a great advantage in thier ms system since they only provide lock spray & nano lock spray options with thier tof systems. they have dual orthogonal interface source for highest sensitivity and isolation valve for cleaning the cone without venting the system at all.


when you talk about your mentioned applications then waters are the only manufacturers who can provide total solutions from sample prep to ms. i am very happy user of thier system for my applications. and i am sure you can get the system within your budget. i wish you all the best and go ahead and buy waters system.

The Finnigan LTQ is a linear ion trap. Quite impressive and does more than ms2 - probably ms5 realistically. Current configurations are with one or two detectors. One of these should be in your budget. What kind of proteomics? There is an AP-MALDI unit that fits on the ms that is quite good - for about 60k. A one detector LTQ and AP-MALDI will work for your budget on a competitive bid. Their software is quite good, also.

Vertel,

Does LTQ or LXQ still suffer from the problem of Finnigan's ion traps (LCQ) on dirty samples?

chhubert

Azwan,

I wouldn't use a triple quadrupole for proteomicsm, and I would be a little bit sceptical of using an ion-trap for quantitation although the latest models are much better (i.e. good control of ion population etc).

It is probably going to depend on the type of proteomics that you need to do (targeted or global). If you go for global you need the fastest instrument you can get for MS-MS that are actually the ion-traps from Thermo (LTQ) and Agilent XCT-Ultra.

Waters Q-ToF has also a nice workflow where they have a full high resolution "scan" and then in the next scan they fragment everything and deconvolute the spectra (i.e. identify which fragment is from which parent ion). Pretty intresting concept, but then you will need to couple it with their Aquity pump that might not be able to be include in your budget.

Although there are a lot of instruments you can buy with 350,000$ in USA, I know that you need to pay a high premium when you are buying a mass spectrometer in a foreign country from a third party vendor...