Assessment of Human Exposure to Chemical Agents by High Throughput Chip-based Nanoelectrospray Mass Spectrometry.

摘要

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention determines human exposure to chemical agents by directly analyzing human biological samples for the chemical agent, its metabolites, or related biomarkers. In a major chemical terrorism event, we expect an influx of thousands of samples, the vast majority of which will be from individuals who were not exposed. We will need to develop high-throughput screening techniques to work through this large number of samples quickly and identify the cases where an exposure occurred. We are currently pursuing such a method that employs a robotic, chip-based nanoelectrospray ionization device coupled to a mass spectrometer to quantitatively determine chemical agent metabolites in human urine.