Advances in high resolution LC/MS instrumentation have dramatically impacted many of the discovery, development, and registration activities in the agrochemical industry. Improvements in the sensitivity, speed, and mass accuracy of LC/MS systems have made them an essential tool in many areas of R&D including; the search for new lead compounds from natural sources, evaluating the suitability of lead structures for advancement, and determining the environmental fate of agrochemicals which is required for compound registration. This talk will discuss the impact LC/MS has made in several of these important areas of modern agrochemical research. Nature continues to serve as a rich source of potential lead chemistries. However, the complexity of natural product extracts makes the search for novel leads in nature a challenging undertaking. LC/MS has many applications in natural product discovery including both 1) dereplication to rapidly screen large numbers of natural product extracts for known biologically active compounds, and 2) detailed structure characterization of unknowns using accurate MS and MS/MS. In this presentation, we will describe the use of several high-resolution tools for the discovery and identification the complex biologically-active structures often encountered in nature. Registration of a new agrochemical requires the determination of its fate in several environmental systems including; plant & animal metabolism, photolysis, soil degradation, hydrolysis, and water sediment. LC/MS plays a critical role in the structural elucidation of the complex trace level metabolites generated in these studies. Modern LC/MS instrumentation combining of high resolution mass spectrometry with tools including micro and nano-scale separations, supercritical fluid chromatography, and ion mobiliseparations have been applied to speed the identification of these challenging environmental degradates. In this presentation we will provide a brief introduction of the several of these techniques, and how they can be applied to the identification of impurities and environmental metabolites.

Accurate mass applications in agricultural research and development

252nd National Meeting (2016)

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