Juan GarcÃa-Góngora
University of Lausanne, Schwitzerland
Title: Analysis by fast GC-MS of cocaine and minor alkaloids, an added value for law enforcement
Biography
Biography: Juan GarcÃa-Góngora
Abstract
The present work is focus on the optimization and validation of the analytical method by fast-GC-MS for the determination of cocaine, and identification of minor alkaloids and most common cutting agents in powders seized by the law enforcement.
Optimization procedure was a deal between the sensibility, signal saturation and time analysis for the identification of minor alkaloids in the presence of a large amount of some substances as it occurs in some real cases. Injection temperature and volume, split ratio as well as the temperature ramp for the separation were the optimized instrumental variables.
The validation was performed using interlaboratory samples of cocaine. For this purpose, the accuracy profile procedure was applied in order to evaluate the capability of the method to quantify samples with a known accuracy and a fixed risk at 5%. The analytical method was accredited by the Swiss Accreditation Service (SAS) according to the UNE-EN ISO/IEC 17025:2005 guidelines.
The method is used as a routine analysis in the forensic laboratory and allows not only the quantification of cocaine but also the profiling analysis of the minor alkaloids in less than 6 min per run.
The profiling study provides information as an added value to the law enforcement, since it provides information about links among cocaine street samples using Pearson correlation coefficients, principal components analysis (PCA) and hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA).