Type: Equipment
Equipment that quantitatively determines the concentrations of one, several or many substances in a biological (serum, plasma, tissue or urine), food or environmental sample. This is achieved by chromatographic separation of the compounds present in the matrix to be studied, either by liquid chromatography or gas chromatography and their subsequent nebulisation with fragmentation to detect the components according to their molecular weight.
This equipment offers high sensitivity in the qualitative and quantitative analysis by mass spectrometry of the analytes of interest in a sample. To separate the components of the sample, the mass spectrometer, which is the detector, is combined with the previous step of liquid or gas chromatography as appropriate for the analyte. It is a fast and very sensitive technique that can be applied to solid and liquid samples and may require pre-processing for extraction of the analytes of interest. All samples have a minimum preprocessing step of deproteinisation and 0.22µm filtration.
- Targeted metabolomics.
- Disease biomarkers.
- Pharmacokinetic analysis.
- Quantitative analysis of chemical substances.
- Food and water analysis.
- In order to be accepted by the metabolomics service, samples must meet certain prerequisites:
- The user must provide detailed information on the origin of the sample (human or animal), type (tissue, biofluids, cell culture), quantity (total number of samples and approximate volume), hazardousness and recommended handling precautions.
- Samples must be labelled unequivocally for perfect identification.
- The user must indicate that he/she is aware of the need to destroy the sample for its determination.
The metabolomics service will not accept:- Infectious samples or samples that are extremely dangerous to handle.
- Human samples that are not completely anonymous.
- Unidentified or defectively labelled samples.
- The user should contact the service before starting to collect samples for testing to determine the best way to deliver the sample.
