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 and Huixiao Hong
Additional contact information
Wenjing Guo: U.S. Food & Drug Administration, National Center for Toxicological Research, 3900 NCTR Road, Jefferson, AR 72079, USA
Jeffrey Archer: U.S. Food & Drug Administration, Arkansas Laboratory, 3900 NCTR Road, Jefferson, AR 72079, USA
Morgan Moore: U.S. Food & Drug Administration, Arkansas Laboratory, 3900 NCTR Road, Jefferson, AR 72079, USA
Jeffrey Bruce: U.S. Food & Drug Administration, Arkansas Laboratory, 3900 NCTR Road, Jefferson, AR 72079, USA
Michelle McLain: U.S. Food & Drug Administration, Arkansas Laboratory, 3900 NCTR Road, Jefferson, AR 72079, USA
Sina Shojaee: U.S. Food & Drug Administration, Arkansas Laboratory, 3900 NCTR Road, Jefferson, AR 72079, USA
Wen Zou: U.S. Food & Drug Administration, National Center for Toxicological Research, 3900 NCTR Road, Jefferson, AR 72079, USA
Linda A. Benjamin: U.S. Food & Drug Administration, Center for Veterinary Medicine, 7500 Standish Place, Rockville, MD 20855, USA
Anthony Adeuya: U.S. Food & Drug Administration, Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, 5001 Campus Dr, College Park, MD 20740, USA
Russell Fairchild: U.S. Food & Drug Administration, Arkansas Laboratory, 3900 NCTR Road, Jefferson, AR 72079, USA
Huixiao Hong: U.S. Food & Drug Administration, National Center for Toxicological Research, 3900 NCTR Road, Jefferson, AR 72079, USA

IJERPH, 2019, vol. 16, issue 21, 1-15

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: persistent organic pollutants; quality control; data usability; gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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