P. M-L Sinues, R. Zenobi, M. Kohler

Investigations on breath analysis have provided preliminary data on its potential in the noninvasive diagnosis of lung diseases. Although the conventional comparisons of exhaled breath in study populations (ie, diseased vs healthy) may help to identify patients with various lung diseases, we believe that the analysis of exhaled breath holds promise beyond this scenario …

J. Zhu, J. Jimenez-Díaz, H. D. Bean, N. A. Daphtary, M. I. Aliyeva, L. K. A. Lundblad and J. E. Hill

Before breath-based diagnostics for lung infections can be implemented in the clinic, it is necessary to understand how the breath volatiles change during the course of infection, and ideally, to identify a core set of breath markers that can be used to diagnose the pathogen at any point during the infection …

C. Berchtold, L. Meier, R. Steinhoff, R. Zenobi

Breath is considered to be an easily accessible matrix, whose chemical composition relates to compounds present in blood. Therefore many metabolites are expected in exhaled breath, which may be used in the future for the development of diagnostic methods. In this article, a new strategy to discriminate between exhaled endogenous metabolites and exhaled exogenous contaminants by direct high-resolution mass spectrometry is introduced.

Neil A. Devenport, Laura C. Sealey, Faisal H. Alruways, Daniel J. Weston, James C. Reynolds, and Colin S. Creaser.

A direct, ambient ionization method has been developed using atmospheric pressure thermal desorption–extractive electrospray–mass spectrometry (AP/TD-EESI-MS) for the detection of the genotoxic impurity (GTI) methyl p-toluenesulfonate (MTS) in a surrogate pharmaceutical matrix. A custom-made thermal desorption probe was used to the desorb and vaporize MTS from the solid state, by rapid heating to 200 °C then cooling to ambient temperature, with a cycle time of 6 min…

P. M.-L. Sinues, M. Kohler, R. Zenobi

The metabolic phenotype varies widely due to external factors such as diet and gut microbiome composition, among others. Urine metabolite profiling studies have suggested that there are highly individual phenotypes that persist over extended periods of time. This hypothesis was tested by analyzing the exhaled breath of a group of subjects during nine days by mass spectrometry.

J. Zhu, H. D. Bean, J. Jiménez-Díaz, and J. E. Hill

Bacterial pneumonia is one of the leading causes of disease-related morbidity and mortality in the world, in part because the diagnostic tools for pneumonia are slow and ineffective. To improve the diagnosis success rates and treatment outcomes for bacterial lung infections, we are exploring the use of SESI-MS breath analysis as a rapid, noninvasive method for determining …

Christian Berchtold; Stefan Schmid; Lukas Meiera and Renato Zenobi.

γ-Hydroxybutyrate (GHB) and γ-butyrolactone (GBL) are used as “date rape drugs” since they cause catalepsy and memory loss. A new application of secondary electrospray ionization (SESI) mass spectrometry for in situ detection of GHB and GBL in drinks and body fluids is introduced.

J. Zhu, J. E. Hill

Escherichia coli O157:H7 (EC O157:H7), as well as its recently emerging non-O157 relatives, are a notorious group of pathogenic bacteria associated with foodborne outbreaks. In this study, we demonstrated that secondary electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (SESI-MS) could be a rapid and accurate detection technology for foodborne pathogens …