(Mass Spectrometric) Non Target Screening–Techniques and Strategies: Volume II
A special issue of Molecules (ISSN 1420-3049). This special issue belongs to the section "Analytical Chemistry".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 December 2025 | Viewed by 2398
Special Issue Editor
2. Urban Water Systems Engineering, Technical University of Munich, 85748 Garching, Germany
Interests: non-target screening; suspects screening; mass spectrometry; liquid chromatography; gas chromatography; supercritical fluid chromatography; chemometrics; data processing
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Mass spectrometric non-target screening (NTS) is a comprehensive and untargeted approach that predominantly detects organic molecules and combines robust analytical measurements with adapted data evaluation concepts, systematic compound identification workflows, and statistical data interpretation.
It is well suited to the identification of new, unexpected, and/or unknown organic compounds as well as to monitoring ‘molecular fingerprints’ and profiling ‘process-relevant’ molecules via statistical methods.
Non-target screening provides special benefits for the investigation of complex samples across various disciplines, including well-characterized samples can contain relevant and as yet undetected compounds. Depending on the nature of the sample and the aim of the analytical process, the presence of such unknown compounds may be highly relevant. Non-target screening is a universal technique that can be applied in many areas such as environmental studies, forensics, foods, metabolomics, and other analyses. Since a round of meetings held in 2016 and beyond covered this topic, and since many books and publications have now delved into NTS, it has attained a new levels of knowledge and awareness.
Many experts in the field have presented at recent digital workshops such as ‘Gas Chromatography meets Non-Target Screening’ (‘GC meets NTS’) or the International Conferences on Non-Target Screening (‘ICNTS’) and have published papers in the first volume of this Special Issue on NTS (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/molecules/special_issues/non_target_screen). The first volume of this Special Issue is also available in book form (https://www.mdpi.com/books/book/6748).
With the aim of continuing to present the expertise of researchers in the field, we invite submissions of manuscripts for publication in this new Special Issue in the Analytical Chemistry Section. The focus here will not be on the applications themselves, but on the techniques, strategies, NTS software solutions and platforms as well as on data evaluation workflows and other developments in NTS. Submissions are welcome that present detailed and transparent quality assurance in terms of both their analytical and data-handling performance.
The authors and Special Issue editors will then proceed a study reporting on topics related to the SRT concept (for details see https://nontargetedanalysis.org/srt/) and coallate it into the Appendix.
Please do not hesitate to contact me if you are interested in publishing your recent developments on this exciting topic.
Dr. Thomas Letzel
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- mass spectrometric non-target screening
- NTS workflows
- NTS strategies
- NTS techniques (separation, ionization, detection)
- HPLC
- SFC
- GC
- CE
- HRMS
- MS/MS
- NTS software solutions
- NTS open access software
- NTS data evaluation
- NTS and quality management
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