Agilent Technologies’ New Accurate-Mass TOF and Q-TOF LC/MS Provide Unmatched Performance

Superior Mass Accuracy, Mass Resolution, Sensitivity and Speed Enable Life Science Studies

today introduced the Agilent 6220 Accurate-Mass time-of-flight (TOF) and 6520 Accurate-Mass quadrupole time-of-flight (Q-TOF) liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (LC/MS) systems, delivering unmatched mass accuracy, mass resolution, sensitivity and speed for proteomics, metabolomics, product degradation and other complex experiments.

The new 6220 TOF and 6520 Q-TOF have added proprietary 32 Gbit/second high-speed data acquisition electronics that dramatically improve mass resolution to 20,000. Additionally, the new products incorporate proprietary dual-gain analog to digital (ADC) time-of-flight electronics for a tenfold improvement of dynamic range -- now approaching up to five orders of magnitude.

“We set out to deliver exceptional analytical performance for MS and MS/MS analyses for experiments demanding the highest accurate-mass measurements, and these two instruments have achieved this,” said Ken Miller, Agilent marketing director, LC/MS Division. “These improvements will enable scientists in metabolomics, proteomics and complex qualitative analyses to find and identify more lower-abundance compounds faster than ever. All of this performance is achieved without significantly compromising rapid analysis time for higher-quality data.”

The new Agilent 6520 Q-TOF has industry-leading performance in the most important categories:

* attomole sensitivity;
* better than 2-ppm MS mass accuracy -- approaching FTMS mass accuracy;
* better than 5-ppm MS/MS mass accuracy -- much better than FTMS mass accuracy at fast spectral acquisition rate;
* Tenfold improvement in in-spectra dynamic range without loss of sensitivity;
* mass resolution to 20,000 -- not dependent on spectral acquisition rate;
* fast data acquisition ( = 10 MS/MS spectra/sec) compatible with fast LC chromatography; and
* broad mass range from m/z 25 to 20,000.

Similarly, when operating in MS mode only, the Agilent 6220 TOF incorporates the same high-speed electronics and ADC TOF technology to deliver the same benefits as when operating in MS/MS mode. Targeted applications include product degradation studies, biomarker discovery, metabolomics and confirmation of compounds in synthetic chemistry labs. The 6220 TOF now uses the Agilent MassHunter Workstation software with advanced data acquisition and qualitative and quantitative data analysis capabilities. These capabilities include unique data-mining functionality based on powerful molecular feature extraction and molecular formula generation algorithms, facilitating identification of compounds in complex mixtures.

Agilent also offers application-specific software packages for the new Accurate-Mass instruments: MassHunter Profiling to find variations between two samples/sample groups; MassHunter Metabolite ID to correlate MS/MS spectra from precursor drugs and metabolites; METLIN Personal, a searchable database of more than 15,000 endogenous metabolites; Spectrum Mill, which quickly and accurately identifies proteins; and GeneSpring MS, a full range of powerful tools for statistical profiling and related data-mining of very large sample sets.

Both the Agilent 6520 QTOF and 6220 TOF are available today.