Seeking advise on the applicability LC-TOF for high through put analysis of pesticide residues. We are already using LC-MS/MS for the pesticide analysis. Advantages/disadvantages of LC-TOF over LC-MS/MS triple quad.
Advantages and disadvantages of LCTOF over LCMSMS depend on your intended applications.
What I can imagine is that, for study of pesticides, if you already have in mind the pesticide and its metabolites that you want to measure, then triple quad is the top choice of instrument. TOF do not offer the SRM/MRM that triple quad offers, and these operating modes reduce background noise substantially and give you good S/N ratio.
However, if you intend to investigate presence of unknown pesticide metabolites in your study (and elucidate its structure later on), then your triple quad has limited application in this case. If you compare TOF against single quad (full scan), TOF usually offers higher resolution, and therefore gives you a better guess of what the molecular formula could be.
in the target analysis LC-MS/MS (triple quad) is generality better in terms of sensitivity and quantitation.
TOF is perfect instrument for unknown analysis, metabolism and metabolomic study etc. TOF sensitivity if lower in comparison with TQ but it depends what kind of instruments (vendor and series) we have compare.
Recently, you can find some publication when similar results can be obtained with both kinds of techniques....
Advantages and disadvantages of LCTOF over LCMSMS depend on your intended applications.
What I can imagine is that, for study of pesticides, if you already have in mind the pesticide and its metabolites that you want to measure, then triple quad is the top choice of instrument. TOF do not offer the SRM/MRM that triple quad offers, and these operating modes reduce background noise substantially and give you good S/N ratio.
However, if you intend to investigate presence of unknown pesticide metabolites in your study (and elucidate its structure later on), then your triple quad has limited application in this case. If you compare TOF against single quad (full scan), TOF usually offers higher resolution, and therefore gives you a better guess of what the molecular formula could be.
Not much more to add, except that SRM/MRM for targeted quantitation (using triple quads) is the gold standard as well as an approved method by many official agencies. TOF analysis, even if with an added Quadrupole, will not achieve the necessary sensitivity to quantify your target analytes in a reproducible and acceptable manner. There are some high-end Q-TOFs available which offer quantitation capacity using different quantitative approaches, such as the Triple-TOF by ABSCIEX and Water's Synapt G2S, and the added ion mobility can really "clean up" your mass spectra, though, so maybe talk to some people from these companies as well.
Keeping the type of analysis you need to do at Spices Board, Triple Quad is a best suitable option. The reason is you are testing the residues of pesticides which are already known and the methods are well established. It is simple to adopt using the well established MRM modes and can go to very low sensitive levels depending upon the instrument Agilent 6490 or ABSCIEX etc.
TOF is almost similar to Ion trap and gives advantage only if it the study is meant for identification of new metabolites or breakdown products.
Globally triple quad is preferred for the quntification of pesticides