Gas Chromatography / Mass Spectrometry (GC/MS)

GC/MS is a combination of two different analytical techniques, Gas Chromatography and

Mass Spectrometry. GC/MS, with the use of internal standards, provides a
multidimensional drug identification and quantitation procedure that is the leading
confirmation method for forensic drug testing.
Gas Chromatography (GC): Gas Chromatography is a technique used to separate drugs
that might be present in a sample. The sample is injected into a long tubular column, the
chromatography column. The drugs are swept through the column by a stream of
helium gas. Drugs in a sample are separated from each other because some take
longer to pass through the column than others. The process is like a race around a
track: at the beginning the racers are all together in a group and at the end they are all
separated with the fast ones finishing far in advance of the slow ones. A drugs
individual chemical characteristic determines how long it will take to go through the
chromatography column. The time it takes for any given drug to travel the length of the
column is referred to as its retention time (RT). The RT for a given drug is an identifying
characteristic.
Mass Spectrometry (MS): The detector for the GC is the Mass Spectrometry (MS)
detector. As a drug exits the end of the GC column it is fragmented by ionization and
the fragments are sorted by mass to form a fragmentation pattern. Like the retention
time (RT), the fragmentation pattern for a given drug is unique and therefore is an
identifying characteristic of the drug. It is so specific that it is often referred to as the
molecular fingerprint.
Internal Standard (I.S.): An Internal Standard (I.S.) is a drug with similar chemical
characteristics to the one being assayed. A precise amount of an I.S. is added to a
sample before it is prepared so that the I.S. is prepared and analyzed in the identical
way as the drug. During analysis, the signal produced by the I.S. is compared to the
signal produced by the drug in question in order to quantify the drug and to qualify the
assay. The ideal internal standard is a deuterated version of the drug in question.
Deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen that has a mass of 1 atomic unit more than
hydrogen. A deuterated drug is manufactured with one or more hydrogen atoms
substituted with a deuterium atom. The deuterated I.S. exhibits the same chemical
characteristics during the sample preparation, and the same RT during GC analysis as a
non-deuterated drug, but can be differentiated by the MS detector due to the mass of the
fragments. Only a GC/MS can utilize a deuterated I.S.
The identification of a drug by its retention time (gas chromatography) and fragmentation
pattern (mass spectrometry), along with sample specific information afforded by the
presence of the deuterated IS combine to make GC/MS the foremost confirmation
method for forensic drug testing.
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