Since its first use for biomedical applications, the instrumentation used in AMS has undergone extensive development, from its origins using large 10MV accelerators repurposed from nuclear structure research to today's state of the art, laboratory-sized dedicated AMS systems. At the Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, we have developed technology that uses lasers to replace accelerators. Such a laser-based instrument offers a significant reduction in complexity, footprint and costs for ultra sensitive 14C detection. Similarily, advances in sample preparation have recognized the need to develop methods that are amenable to reliable, high-throughput processing and can obviate or eliminate sample to sample contamination. To this end, we have developed an in-line combustion interface, coupled to our CO2 gas-accepting ion source attached to our 250 kV AMS spectrometer, to enable the direct analysis of nonvolatile carbonaceous samples. Our interface is based on the moving wire technique and allows for both the analysis of discrete small samples, as well as for continuous flow applications to directly measure the output of a coupled HPLC in real time. Discrete samples containing a few 10s of nanograms of carbon and as little as 50 zmol 14C can be measured with a 3-5% precision in a few minutes. Sample to sample memory is minimized by the use of fresh targets for each discrete sample or by minimizing the amount of 12C present in a peak generated by an HPLC containing a signficant amount of 14C. Liquid sample AMS provides a new technology to expand our biomedical AMS program by enabling the capability to measure low-level biochemicals in extremely small samples that would otherwise be inaccessible. Work performed at the Research Resource for Biomedical AMS, which is operated at LLNL under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy under contract DE-AC52-07NA27344, is supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), Biomedical Technology Research Resources (BTRR) under grant number 8P41GM103483.

Technological developments for BioAMS applications

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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