Chapter 6 LC–MS applications in environmental and food analysis

This chapter offers a comprehensive overview of the main application fields of liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC–MS) technology, highlighting practical aspects, advantages, and shortcomings. The areas covered include environmental and food applications. Emphasis is placed on potentiality and pitfalls of the different LC–MS approaches to perform both confirmation analysis and large‐scale screening analysis of pesticides, drugs, and toxins using both low‐ and high‐resolution mass spectrometry. The key role of LC–MS in the emerging omics technologies (proteomics, metabolomics, and lipidomics) will also be discussed along with “global” or “targeted” strategies to identify a huge number of proteins or metabolites. Latest advances and potential trends using LC–MS are also outlined in the several branches of the analytical chemistry.