Cover Story

April 3, 2006

Volume 84, Number 14

pp. 45-51

Better Than Ever At Pittcon 2006

Attendance may be slipping, but enthusiasm for new and innovative analytical instrumentation has not waned

Stu Borman

Pittcon, the Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry & Applied Spectroscopy, was first held in Pittsburgh in 1950. This year, Pittcon held its 57th meeting in Orlando, Fla., where it delivered on its annual promise to provide a wide range of edifying presentations on analytical chemistry and to introduce a plethora of the latest analytical instruments for research and industry. The 2006 meeting saw the use of innovative technologies to develop instruments that, at least in some cases, are smaller and cheaper, offer higher performance, and are overall just better than ever before.

One Pittcon 2006 highlight was Thermo Electron's LTQ Orbitrap mass spectrometer, "the first totally new mass analyzer to be introduced to the market in more than 20 years," according to the company.

The Orbitrap design was patented in 1999 (U.S. patent 5,886,346) and was first described in detail in a scientific journal six years ago (Anal. Chem. 2000, 72, 1156). The Orbitrap "has ions spinning around a carefully shaped central electrode while shuttling back and forth over its long axis in harmonic motion at frequencies dependent only on their mass-to-charge ratios," explained professor of analytical chemistry R. Graham Cooks and associate research scientist Zheng Ouyang of Purdue University, who commented together by e-mail on MS new products. Cooks's group specializes in MS fundamental phenomena, instrumentation, and analytical applications, and Ouyang has been responsible for the construction of a number of new types of mass spectrometers.

Thermo's LTQ Orbitrap is a hybrid instrument in that it combines the Orbitrap analyzer with a linear ion-trap analyzer, the Finnigan LTQ. According to the company, this design enables faster and more sensitive detection of compounds in complex mixtures than with conventional mass spectrometers. The instrument's "outstanding mass accuracy, mass resolution, and [high sensitivity] make it a clear alternative to existing hybrid time-of-flight systems," Thermo says. Media representatives vote on what they believe to be the most significant new products at Pittcon each year, and the LTQ Orbitrap won the first-place Pittcon Editors' Gold Award this year.

Cooks and Ouyang pointed out that the LTQ Orbitrap's performance is comparable to that of a Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometer and would be attractive to FT-ICR users because it's cheaper to maintain. "It would also be attractive to quadrupole time-of-flight users due to the relatively small additional cost to obtain higher resolution and better mass accuracy together with more stages of tandem MS," they noted.

Cooks and Ouyang also liked two new tools for ion dissociati