The Open Pesticide Transition Library (oPestTL)

The identification
of pesticide residues is a critical application
in environmental and food safety analysis. The most common methods
for pesticide residue detection and quantification are performed with
liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LCMS) using instruments
with varying architectures and characteristics. Pesticides have diverse
structural and elemental compositions and often require laborious
instrument-specific user optimization to identify ideal adducts and
fragment ions. While pesticide transition libraries can be purchased
from instrument vendors, little of this information exists in the
public domain. The Open Pesticide Transition Library (oPestTL) is
an effort to compile a comprehensive list of pesticide ion targets
and fragments to facilitate the rapid development of screening methods
for any LCMS hardware configuration. While a work that must inevitably
evolve, the oPestTL library release detailed here contains over 4,000
individual transitions spread across seven separate LCMS platforms
making it the largest openly available collection of pesticide methods
ever assembled. The oPestTL library can be freely downloaded or interrogated
through an open web application: https://proteomicsnews.shinyapps.io/oPestTLv104/.