Whose Peak Is It?

Attributing Carryover in the Blank Injections of a Shared LC–MS Instrument to the Batches That Left It

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement matches every ghost feature in 1,156 post-batch solvent blanks from one year on a shared UHPLC–QTOF instrument against the 30 user batches before each blank. Of 9,838 ghost features, 55.5 per cent trace to exactly one earlier batch, and 44.4 per cent of those come from two or more batches back; a stronger needle wash halved the fast, injection-path carryover while a column replacement only briefly removed the slow, column-held tail, and the facility's rule of charging the previous user would have misassigned 46.9 per cent of attributable signal.

@misc{slop_22uoty,
  author       = {Sten Okwuosa and Casimir Beng and Vigdis Emenike},
  title        = {Whose Peak Is It?: Attributing Carryover in the Blank Injections of a Shared LC–MS Instrument to the Batches That Left It},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.22uoty},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-attributing-ghost-peaks-22uoty/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}