NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Thermo Fisher Scientific today announced two collaborations aimed at improving methods of detecting and measuring pesticide residues in food.
The collaborations are with Thermo Fisher's Pesticide Analysis Center of Excellence in Runcorn, UK and will leverage the company's mass spectrometers. In one deal, the European Union Reference Laboratories for Residues of Pesticides in Fruits and Vegetables at the University of Almeria, Spain will develop a method based on the Q-Exactive Orbitrap LC-MS technology to screen, quantify, and confirm hundreds of analytes in a single run.
Additionally, the partners seek to "eliminate matrix interferences from a variety of food samples," Thermo Fisher said.
In another collaboration, the UK Food and Environment Research Agency, a UK national reference lab, will use the TSQ 8000 triple quadrupole pesticide analyzer to develop methods of trace level analysis of more than 150 targeted pesticide residues in a range of food products. The work will be led by Richard Fussell, senior scientist at the reference lab.
"We believe high resolution accurate mass spectrometry can bring significant improvements into day to day pesticide analysis," Amadeo Rodriquez Fernandez-Alba, a professor at the Almeria lab, said in a statement. "The capability to provide very accurate mass measurement along with excellent sensitivity and confirmatory information would improve lab throughput significantly, and would allow for more effective pesticide residue monitoring."