Singapore, Jul 2, 2009: Agilent Technologies introduced the 6430 triple quadrupole liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (LC/MS) system, the next generation of the popular 6410 instrument, delivering higher sensitivity, faster monitoring of ions and faster polarity switching.

 

The Agilent 6430 is extremely well suited for food testing, water analysis and protein biomarker discovery and validation. The huge added performance comes at a very modest price increase over the previous model.

 

"We've been very gratified with the strong acceptance of the 6400 family of triple quads over the last three years, and this new model is a continuation of our strategy to provide highly sensitive, rugged, easy-to-use LC triple quads at attractive prices," said Ken Miller, Agilent global marketing director, LC/MS.

 

The 6430 shares many of the high-performance features of Agilent's premium 6460 triple quadrupole MS, including an additional turbo pump for better ion transmission and better sensitivity, an option for the 6410 that is now standard on the 6430. The new instrument also features much faster polarity switching, able to switch from positive ion mode to negative ion mode in 30 ms. This allows greater flexibility to analyze complex mixtures and to optimize sensitivity by exploiting the most prolific ions for a given analyte.

 

The release noted that Agilent 6430 is bundled with new MassHunter software that enhances sensitivity and reproducibility for complex analyses; a food sample, for example, in which 100 compounds must be tested for. The software includes Agilent's unique Dynamic Multiple Reaction Monitoring (MRM) which adjusts and aligns ion transitions with compound retention time. MassHunter now also includes new quantitative analysis software which is five times faster than the previous version.

 

The new instrument also comes with Agilent's popular method optimization software, MH optimizer, for automatic selection of the best analysis parameters for small molecules, with an extension for protein quantitation to follow.