Blog Posts
(opens in new tab) My 2026 Tesla Model S Plaid: I Bought It for the Power, but the Intelligence Impressed Me Most I have owned three generations of the Tesla Model S, and each was impressive in its time. However, my 2026 Model S Plaid has advanced so far beyond the earlier cars that […]
(opens in new tab) Current NIST26 Software Issues This section briefly describes software bugs identified in the current NIST26 EI GC-MS […]
Return to Home Page My hope is that these resources will be widely used by students, educators, researchers, forensic scientists, and practicing mass spectrometrists. If you find them useful, I encourage you to share them with others. While attribution is required under the CC BY 4.0 license, my primary goal is simply to help […]
The identification of illicit drugs and related compounds often requires more than a single analytical technique. Established controlled substances may be recognized through conventional library searching, while emerging drugs, structural analogs, impurities, mixtures, and new psychoactive substances may not have an exact reference spectrum available. In these cases, reliable identification depends on combining complementary analytical […]
Return to Home Page The NIST26 reference libraries provide the foundation for high-quality GC-MS library searching. However, the Wiley Registry, Wiley specialty libraries, other commercial specialty libraries, and your own user libraries can significantly expand the range of compounds available for identification when searched in conjunction with the NIST26 libraries. This tutorial demonstrates how to […]
. One of the greatest misconceptions in analytical chemistry is that every unknown compound is completely new. In reality, many unknowns encountered in environmental, pharmaceutical, forensic, industrial, and natural product analyses have already been reported somewhere in the chemical literature or exist within one of the world’s chemical reference databases. These compounds are unknown to […]
. Solid Phase Microextraction (SPME) is one of the most powerful sample preparation techniques available for GC-MS. This free workshop provides a practical, experience-based introduction to SPME, covering fiber selection, method development, troubleshooting, quantitative analysis, and real-world applications. The presentation is intended for students, new practitioners, and experienced analysts who want to better understand how […]
. This in an Introductory Course in NIST26 LC-MS/MS V4.0 This page contains ALL FREE resources for learning the fundamentals of accurate mass liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). It is intended for, new users of LC-MS instruments, university students, and experienced GC-MS users who wish to expand into LC-MS/MS. It employs ~90 minutes of YouTube […]
The NIST26 EI GC-MS Search Program (Version 4.0) represents the most significant enhancement to the NIST EI workflow in many years. In addition to the greatly expanded EI spectral and retention index libraries, Version 4.0 introduces an integrated chromatographic processing workflow that combines the capabilities of the traditional AMDIS deconvolution software directly within the NIST […]
Unknown identification by LC-MS/MS has become increasingly challenging as laboratories encounter more compounds, adducts, metabolites, contaminants, and transformation products. NIST26 provides a powerful integrated workflow that combines chromatographic processing, accurate-mass measurements, isotopic fidelity, and one of the world’s largest curated MS/MS spectral libraries to improve confidence in compound identification. With the V4.0 (2026) release, NIST […]