Katja Hall won a student poster award at the 2020 Winter Conference on Plasma Spectrochemistry, held in Tucson, AZ. The award was sponsored by the RSC Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry. TheThe work, co authored by Ashli Polanco, George Liang, Ryan Graham, Shaun Galbraith, Seongkyu Yoon, and Ken Marcus was titled: “Utilizing the Liquid Sampling – Atmospheric Pressure Glow Discharge for At-Bioreactor Quantification of Trace Metals in Cell Culture Media via Mass Spectrometry” Congrats Katja!
You may read more about the work performed by Dr. Marcus’ Research Group or check the abstract of the presentation.
Abstract: The growth characteristics of cell culture are often affected by the metal ions present in the feed media. Since even trace amounts of certain metals affect production, controlling both the metal composition and concentrations is a crucial component of cell growth processes. As such, a growing area of bioanalytical chemistry research is the development of methods and instruments capable of continuous, real-time at-bioreactor metal concentration monitoring. Instruments capable of performing these analyses would be incredibly valuable as they could be employed as a production control factor. Currently, few procedures for this application are available, relying on ICP-MS instrumentation. Due to the large size as well as the consumable and utility support requirements of ICP-MS, these instruments are incapable of at-reactor monitoring so discrete samples must be taken on the factory floor and transported to the instrument laboratory. In order to address the shortcomings of ICP-MS instrumentation towards at-bioreactor trace metal analysis, the liquid sampling – atmospheric pressure glow discharge (LS-APGD) has been employed. The LS-APGD is inexpensive to manufacture, cheaper to maintain than an ICP, and has been previously demonstrated to pair well with reduced-format mass spectrometers for elemental analysis. When paired with MS, the LS-APGD is capable of low-ppb level limits of detection for a wide array of metals. Described here is the pairing of the LS-APGD with an Advion compact mass spectrometer (CMS) for the quantification of trace metals in cell culture media. Using the Advion CMS for this application provides the potential to minimize production delays by allowing trace metals analysis to be performed at-reactor instead of transporting samples to an ICP-MS. Described here are the experiments relevant to the initial pairing of the LS-APGD to the Advion CMS towards the bioreactor monitoring application. Parametric optimizations of mass spectrometer operating conditions as well as the LS-APGD operating conditions are described. Figures of merit for key metals relevant to bioreactor analysis are reported and preliminary work with CHO media is discussed.
