Identifying Compounds Despite Chromatography Limitations: Organophosphates In Treated Sewage

Identifying compounds in complex mixtures can be difficult when coelution occurs, clean analyte mass spectra are unobtainable, or plausible library mass spectral matches cannot be found. The authors discuss a novel high resolution mass spectral technique - ion composition elucidation - that acquires data to determine the compositions of ions in mass spectra as the compounds are eluted into the mass spectrometer. This information often leads to the identification of compounds that otherwise would be neglected.