Using AnalyzerPro for Quantitation

The Quantitation tutorial has been designed to help you use AnalyzerPro for quantitation. The example that we present here is a pesticide residue analysis of Silver Gull eggs from Penguin Island, Western Australia. Organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) are a group of pesticide compounds including dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) and its breakdown product dichlorodiphenyldichloroethylene (DDE), endrin and dieldrin. Compounds in this group were among the first pesticides to be developed and used commercially for pest control, and resulted in reduced crop losses due to its effective control of agricultural pests. Most insecticides are broad-spectrum and non-specific and consequently other organisms which are beneficial to the crop are indiscriminately targeted.

Seabirds are a group of animals which can be subject to high levels of chemical contaminants. Exposure to contamination is largely due to their natural distribution in marine and other aquatic environments which are at particular risk from pollution due to the ease and speed with which contaminants move in water. Additionally, due to their predatory nature and since organochlorine pesticides are highly lipophilic and persistently bound within animal tissues, seabirds are prone to accumulating higher amounts of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) such as OCPs due to bioaccumulation in the food chain. Seabirds are generally long-lived species compared to other types of birds which allows for greater concentrations of contaminants to accumulate in their tissues. Seabirds have long been considered as suitable sentinel organisms for the environmental monitoring of contaminants. They are large, conspicuous birds and thus changes in the health, population size or breeding behaviours can be easily observed. By extension, due to the transfer of contaminants from females, seabird eggs have been identified as an important environmental monitoring tool.

In this tutorial we will only be working with a small data set to teach you the basic steps necessary to use AnalyzerPro for quantitation. A robust experimental design requires as many sample replicates as possible to give the resulting data sufficient statistical power. Here we demonstrate the AnalyzerPro workflow using a single calibration block, three quality control samples and 12 egg shell samples. The samples were acquired on a Bruker SCION GC-QQQ-MS operated in MRM mode.

Example data:
Before working through this tutorial, download the data set from the following link: http://bit.ly/2eSXlHQ.

The Quantitation tutorial can be downloaded as a PDF and you can watch the related video on YouTube