QUICK: Quality and Usability Investigation and Control Kit for Mass Spectrometric Data from Detection of Persistent Organic Pollutants

Wenjing Guo; Jeffrey Archer; Morgan Moore; Jeffrey Bruce; Michelle McLain; Sina Shojaee; Wen Zou; Linda A Benjamin; Anthony Adeuya; Russell Fairchild; Huixiao Hong

doi:10.3390/ijerph16214203

QUICK: Quality and Usability Investigation and Control Kit for Mass Spectrometric Data from Detection of Persistent Organic Pollutants

Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2019 Oct 30;16(21):4203. doi: 10.3390/ijerph16214203.

Authors

Wenjing Guo¹, Jeffrey Archer², Morgan Moore³, Jeffrey Bruce⁴, Michelle McLain⁵, Sina Shojaee⁶, Wen Zou⁷, Linda A Benjamin⁸, Anthony Adeuya⁹, Russell Fairchild¹⁰, Huixiao Hong¹¹

Affiliations

¹ U.S. Food & Drug Administration, National Center for Toxicological Research, 3900 NCTR Road, Jefferson, AR 72079, USA. Wenjing.guo@fda.hhs.gov.
² U.S. Food & Drug Administration, Arkansas Laboratory, 3900 NCTR Road, Jefferson, AR 72079, USA. Jeffrey.Archer@fda.hhs.gov.
³ U.S. Food & Drug Administration, Arkansas Laboratory, 3900 NCTR Road, Jefferson, AR 72079, USA. Morgan.Moore@fda.hhs.gov.
⁴ U.S. Food & Drug Administration, Arkansas Laboratory, 3900 NCTR Road, Jefferson, AR 72079, USA. Jeffrey.Bruce@fda.hhs.gov.
⁵ U.S. Food & Drug Administration, Arkansas Laboratory, 3900 NCTR Road, Jefferson, AR 72079, USA. Michelle.McLain@fda.hhs.gov.
⁶ U.S. Food & Drug Administration, Arkansas Laboratory, 3900 NCTR Road, Jefferson, AR 72079, USA. Sina.Shojaee@fda.hhs.gov.
⁷ U.S. Food & Drug Administration, National Center for Toxicological Research, 3900 NCTR Road, Jefferson, AR 72079, USA. Wen.Zou@fda.hhs.gov.
⁸ U.S. Food & Drug Administration, Center for Veterinary Medicine, 7500 Standish Place, Rockville, MD 20855, USA. Linda.Benjamin@fda.hhs.gov.
⁹ U.S. Food & Drug Administration, Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, 5001 Campus Dr, College Park, MD 20740, USA. Anthony.Adeuya@fda.hhs.gov.
¹⁰ U.S. Food & Drug Administration, Arkansas Laboratory, 3900 NCTR Road, Jefferson, AR 72079, USA. Russell.Fairchild@fda.hhs.gov.
¹¹ U.S. Food & Drug Administration, National Center for Toxicological Research, 3900 NCTR Road, Jefferson, AR 72079, USA. huixiao.hong@fda.hhs.gov.

Abstract

Persistent organic pollutants (POPs) cause a significant public and environmental health concern due to their toxicity, long-range transportability, persistence, and bioaccumulation. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has a program to monitor POPs in human and animal foods at ultra-trace levels, using gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (GC-MS). Stringent quality control procedures are practiced within this program, ensuring the reliability and accuracy of these POP results. Due to the complexity of this program's quality control (QC), the decision-making process for data usability was very time-consuming, upward of three analyst hours for a batch of six extracts. We significantly reduced this time by developing a software kit, written in Python, to evaluate instrument and sample QC, along with data usability. A diverse set of 45 samples were tested using our software, QUICK (Quality and Usability Investigation and Control Kit), that resulted in equivalent results provided by a human reviewer. The software improved the efficiency of the analytical process by reducing the need for user intervention, while simultaneously recognizing a 95% decrease in data reduction time, from 3 hours to 10 minutes.

Keywords: data usability; gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS); persistent organic pollutants; quality control.

Publication types

Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.
Research Support, U.S. Gov't, P.H.S.

MeSH terms

Animals
Environmental Pollutants / analysis*
Environmental Pollutants / chemistry
Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry / methods*
Humans
Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / methods*
Organic Chemicals / analysis*
Organic Chemicals / chemistry
Reproducibility of Results
Time Factors

Substances

Environmental Pollutants
Organic Chemicals