Agilent Technologies Introduces New Products At ASMS

Seattle, WA - Agilent Technologies Inc. continued with its largest multi-platform launch ever, announcing the latest additions to its highly integrated range of LC/MS products. Agilent's new portfolio is designed to fill price-performance gaps in small and large molecule analysis, from traditional food, forensic, environmental and other chemical-analysis testing to the latest life science applications.

"Coordinated design of our new 1200 HPLC (high-performance liquid chromatograph) with a new line of LC/MS (liquid chromatograph/mass spectrometer) systems, sample prep components, instrument software platforms and bioinformatics solutions has allowed us to address multiple bottlenecks in complex customer workflows," said Taia Ergueta, general manager of Agilent's mass spectrometry business. "The resulting design integration delivers substantially better performance and value than if we were to have introduced these systems one product at a time."

Agilent announced availability of the following products:

• Agilent's 6510 Quadrupole Time-of-flight (Q-TOF) LC/MS, which sets a new performance standard in its class. It is 10 times more sensitive than comparable instruments, delivers the fastest data-dependent acquisition speed at up to 20 spectra per second, and provides better than 2 ppm mass accuracy in MS mode. Because the 6510 shares its collision cell with the new 6410 Triple Quadrupole LC/MS, target ions from the first MS/MS stage of a biomarker-profiling experiment can be run in the second MS/MS stage without introducing variability. This is highly useful for validation studies.

• Agilent's 6100 Series of single quadrupole MS instruments have a 40-percent smaller footprint than their predecessors. The Agilent 6140 Single Quad delivers a scanning speed of 10,000 amu/second, fast enough to keep pace with the Agilent 1200 Rapid Resolution System, the industry's fastest LC. The Agilent 6130 Single Quad, a full-featured research-grade instrument, delivers 1-picogram sensitivity, multi-signal capability and a full mass range to 3,000 amu. The Agilent 6120 Single Quad offers 10-picogram sensitivity and positive/negative switching capability. Agilent's 6110 Single Quad is an entry-level model offering 10-picogram sensitivity and an 18-percent lower price than the previous model.

• Two products for the front end of the proteomics/biomarker workflow: The Multiple Affinity Removal System 7 LC column or spin tube fully removes the seven most abundant proteins from human blood or serum, unmasking previously undetectable proteins that are potential biomarkers. The Agilent 3100 OFFGEL Fractionator is a novel way to fractionate both intact proteins and peptides, and recover them in solution for easy introduction to the MS.

• GeneSpring MS, a gene-expression bioinformatics platform, enables scientists to visualize differentials in complex data between any number of samples, making it a powerful tool for performing biomarker discovery studies.

Advantages of Design Integration in Biomarker Discovery
Many researchers use a data-dependent "shotgun" strategy in which samples are run on MS/MS, and candidates are sorted from the data. This approach misses many biomarker candidates and cannot provide an acceptable level of statistical confidence. A profiling approach, on the other hand, involves vastly reducing sample complexity early in the workflow, using intelligent two-step profiling in front of MS/MS to identify biomarkers.

Agilent identified areas in the workflow where the company's strengths could yield the most improvement. The company began by building instruments that work well together. For example, the 6510 Q-TOF is built to keep pace with the fast 1200 Series Rapid Resolution System. Another example is the common collision cell between the 6510 Q-TOF and the 6410 triple quad to eliminate variability between mass spec analysis stages. A third example is the HPLC-Chip/MS which can be unplugged from one mass spec and plugged into the second one, eliminating another source of variability in profiling experiments. In addition, the new Multiple Affinity Removal System 7 and 3100 OFFGEL Fractionator facilitate delivery of clean samples to the LC/MS, earlier in the workflow.

The new Agilent MassHunter Workstation software platform was designed to enhance the utility of the new instruments. The MassHunter Profiling software labels mass, retention time and abundance of two samples to identify peptides that are differentially up- or down-regulated. A specialized feature extraction algorithm groups ions to reveal low-level proteins, eliminating as much complexity as possible to facilitate detection and quantitation of target compounds. The MassHunter Workstation controls the TOF in the relative abundance analysis run and also the MS/MS in the second run for seamless data transfer. These results are searched by Spectrum Mill for MassHunter Workstation, another module of the MassHunter suite, providing precise identification of biomarkers. Agilent's new 6510 QTOF can conduct the MS profiling and MS/MS identification runs on the same instrument, further simplifying the biomarker workflow.

The same HPLC method and HPLC-chip used in profiling and identification can be employed again on the triple quad for validation studies, eliminating a source of variability. The Agilent 6510 and 6410 LC/MS systems use identical collision cells, eliminating variability of data when comparing parent and daughter data between the new instruments.

SOURCE: Agilent Technologies