A novel 'peak parking' strategy for ultra-performance liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometric detection for enhanced performance of bioanalytical assays.

Sensitive and high-throughput bioanalytical assays are of vital importance to drug discovery and development. Ultra-performance liquid chromatography (UPLC), utilizing sub-2-microm particles, greatly increases the separation throughput and efficiency, resulting in LC peaks as narrow as or less than 1 s (full width at half maxima, FWHM). This, however, could pose practical challenges for bioanalytical applications using quadrupole mass spectrometry (MS) to acquire sufficient data points to ensure accurate and reliable quantitation.