Recent Developments in GC/MS

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CCI Newsletter, No. 26, November 2000

Recent Developments in GC/MS

by Ian N.M. Wainwright, Manager, Analytical Research Laboratory

Figure 1

Geneviève Sansoucy, who is experienced in the analysis of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), pesticides, hydrocarbons, and other pollutants using GC/MS, working with CCI's new Agilent GC/MS.

One of the most difficult tasks facing analytical chemists is the identification of the natural organic products found in museum artifacts and archaeological sites. The list of such materials is endless: oils, resins, waxes, plant gums, tempera, glue, casein, glair, dyes, amber, and food residues. The solutions to problems in conservation science and archaeometry frequently hinge on a comprehensive identification of these very materials. One analytical method that has been successfully applied by CCI and other conservation science laboratories around the world is gas chromatography/mass spectrometry—or GC/MS.

The general approach of GC/MS is to separate components of a mixture and identify them based on their characteristic mass spectra. The GC separation involves the partitioning of a mixture between a moving gas phase and a stationary phase. This is followed by the breakdown of individual compounds into a characteristic pattern of fragments in the mass spectrometer. The challenge for chemists at CCI is that the samples they receive are not only extremely small but are typically contaminated and oxidized or polymerized; this leaves only a small fraction of components that can be analysed by GC/MS.

CCI has recently acquired an Agilent (formerly Hewlett Packard) HP 6890 Plus Gas Chromatograph system with an HP 5973 mass selective detector, and hired scientist Geneviève Sansoucy to work with the instrument. This new system (which replaces an aging one) complements the existing Fourier transform infrared spectrometers and high performance liquid chromatograph, and allows CCI to conduct more accurate and thorough analyses of a wide range of materials.