Chromatography Forum

Our internal powers-that-be have declared that all our in-house documents should use the same abbreviation for liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry. We have noticed a lack of consensus in the literature. IUPAC seems to be heading firmly toward "MS/MS" (rather than "MS-MS") but seems silent or ambiguous about what connects the chromatography to the mass spectrometry. They list both "GC/MS" and "LCMS" in the appendix of the current (March 2006) draft (http://www.msterms.com/docs/IUPAC_MS_Te ... _Draft.pdf).

So, my question to the readers of this forum: Is there a hyphen in the abbreviation of hyphenated techniques?

If such an important question arises, it is in my experience best to sit back and wait until the question resolves itself.

I believe John Langley from the BMSS was putting together a list of such abbreviations for IUPAC. He passed them around for discussion/comment a while back. I cant recall if they have been published as yet. You could try contacting John via the BMSS website.

That would be the document I quoted above that lists both "GC/MS" and "LCMS"...

Even though I'm still a grad student so what I say doesn't yet count for anything, my opinion is to hyphenate, since they are after all hyphenated techniques. Also a separation between the chromatography and the detector is necessary. If they were the same procedure, then write it out as LCMS, but as they are not, there should be a distinction between the two.
But as I said, my opinion doesn't count yet, so I'll just wait and see what IUPAC concludes