Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometry: A Simple but Versatile Analytical Tool for Identifying Toxicants

Current testing methods for environmental chemicals in people's bodies can be expanded to include more chemicals, a wider range of the human population, tissues other than blood and urine, and potential sources of exposure such as food. Combining these improvements with powerful new methods capable of identifying “non-targeted” chemicals (e.g. screening for unknown chemicals) will greatly expand our chemical testing capacity and our understanding of potential chemical contributors to disease. One new method is Liquid Chromatography- Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometry (TOF LC-MS), which is capable of accurately matching the measured mass of a chemical with a molecular formula. With the use of appropriate chemical databases, this method can facilitate non-targeted analysis of environmental chemicals in environmental and biological samples allowing for identification of emerging environmental chemicals. This method is currently used for clinical and pharmaceutical testing, but its use in identifying environmental chemicals has been limited to date. The session will include a review of existing methods and an introduction to the next generation of biomonitoring techniques, with emphasis on the potential of TOF LC-MS for ‘non-targeted' testing