Wide-Scope Screening of Illegal Adulterants in Dietary and Herbal Supplements via Rapid Polarity-Switching and Multistage Accurate Mass Confirmation Using an LC-IT/TOF Hybrid Instrument

A new analytical strategy was developed that integrates a generic sample preparation into a liquid chromatography–multistage ion trap/time-of-flight mass spectrometry (LC-IT(MSn)/TOF), allowing for large-scale screening and qualitative confirmation of wide-scope illegal adulterants in different food matrices. Samples were pretreated by a fast single-tube multifunction extraction for accurate multistage mass measurement on the hybrid LC-IT/TOF...