IBO has selected Thermo Fisher Scientific’s Orbitrap Elite as the product of the show for this year’s ASMS meeting. While Agilent’s 7200 Q-TOF GC/MS further expands the GC/MS market and Thermo Fisher Scientific’s Q-Exactive will undoubtedly have a strong impact on the mid-range LC/MS market, the Orbitrap Elite offers a dramatic performance improvement to what was already the Ferrari of scientific instruments, and its development will impact much of the rest of the market as the technology “trickles down” into other MS models.

The biggest improvement over previous Orbitrap systems is a leap in resolution to more than 240,000 FWHM from 100,000 FWHM, which puts the Orbitrap Elite close to the level of performance found only in Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance (FT-ICR) MS, which requires large superconducting magnets to achieve such resolution. Thermo has achieved this feat by shrinking the architecture of the Orbitrap mass analyzer, which is the newest mass analyzer in wide commercial use.

In addition to the resolution gain, the Orbitrap Elite quadruples its maximum scan speed to 4 Hz and offers the same mass accuracy (<1 ppm) and fragmentation methods (electron-transfer dissociation, collision-induced dissociation and high-energy collisional dissociation) as previous-generation top-end Orbitrap models. It doesn’t hurt that Thermo’s Velos Pro ion trap, which also doubles its stand-alone scan speed to 66,000 amu/second, is used as the front-end for the Orbitrap Elite. The significance of the Orbitrap Elite is more than performance specifications. The dramatic enhancement in performance comes from major improvements in manufacturing, resulting in the ability to reliably manufacture the Orbitrap mass analyzer with much smaller dimensions. As costs come down, this much more compact mass analyzer design will undoubtedly find its way into lower-tier Orbitrap and Exactive systems. It is also quite impressive to consider that the first commercial Orbitrap was introduced to the world a mere six years ago (see IBO 6/15/05) and was so successful that Thermo willingly cannibalized its LTQ-FT (FT-ICR) MS business.