Syagen Technology - Technology Overview

Speed is needed to respond quickly to chemical/biological threat situations, and is also required to conduct repetitive sampling as in explosives screening of personnel.

Accuracy has many levels of requirements. For terrorist threat detection, accuracy means “making the call” if a targeted compound is present and doing so with minimum false negative and false positive rates. For purity and yield analysis, accuracy means minimizing the uncertainty in measuring relative and absolute concentrations.

Throughput is the capability to analyze a large number of samples in reasonable periods of time. This is required for a wide range of applications, including:

• continuous real-time threat detection
• personnel and baggage screening at airports and secured areas
• analysis of large libraries of compounds such as pharmaceutical drug libraries

Syagen has developed several innovative technologies based on mass spectrometry to achieve these detection capabilities and has demonstrated unique benefits for a variety of high-throughput applications. Some of these technologies include:

Photoionization (PI) is a new class of ionizer for commercial liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (LC/MS). PI offers a unique combination of capabilities that includes detection of many important classes of compounds not detectable by electrospray (ESI) or atmospheric pressure chemical ionization (APCI), soft ionization giving simple ion spectra with minimal fragmentation, large linear dynamic range, and minimal ionization of air and solvents.

With the introduction of the quadrupole ion trap, time-of-flight (QitTof) mass analyzer, Syagen has successfully developed commercial capabilities from research technologies. This technology provides high sensitivity and the unique capability of MSⁿ for a time-of-flight instrument.

Syagen has taken the PI / QitTof MS technology and reduced it to a field portable version capable of direct analysis of air, liquid, and soil samples. Named the FieldMate, the monitor enables direct detection using photoionization as well as electron ionization (EI) for use with a GC front end. The FieldMate has been configured for CB threat detection as well as for general environmental and hazardous compound monitoring.

The conventional method used to screen for explosives at airports is ion mobility spectrometry (IMS). This technology works well for clean samples and when targeting only a few compounds, but can lead to inaccuracies for complex samples and in the detection of an expanding list of new threat compounds. As MS offers much greater accuracy and specificity, it is the leading candidate to meet the increasing threat requirements of the future. Syagen has developed a leading candidate for an explosives-detecting MS system.

Download publications and presentations on Explosives Detecting MS