The rapid spread of designer drugs has introduced significant identification challenges to the forensic science community. This webinar discusses how Mass Spectrometry and the “Hybrid Search” can be used to get a head start on identifying novel opioids.
Mass spectral library searching is an important tool in seized drug identification. It allows an analyst to identify a drug by comparing the experimental spectrum to a reference set of spectra for known compounds. The primary limitation of conventional library search algorithms is the requirement that the mass spectral database contain a representative spectrum of the query compound. This limitation is particularly restrictive when novel molecules are synthesized more rapidly than they can be added to mass spectral libraries.