LC-MS combines two steps. Liquid chromatography pushes a dissolved sample through a packed column so that its compounds come out at different times; a mass spectrometer then weighs the molecules, and their fragments, to identify each one. “MS/MS” means two stages of mass analysis for extra certainty.
It is the workhorse of the research cited in the journal. A 2017 human study measured psilocin in blood and urine by LC-MS/MS (Brown et al., 2017). A 2022 survey measured five tryptamines in 226 mushroom fruiting bodies by UHPLC-MS/MS, an ultra-high-pressure version (Gotvaldová et al., 2022). A 2013 study used LC/MS/MS to confirm DMT in rat pineal microdialysate (Barker et al., 2013).
There is a Canadian example too: an Ontario case report describes a teenager with acute kidney injury after eating Psilocybe cubensis that mass spectrometry confirmed contained psilocin (Austin et al., 2019). A result describes the sample tested and only the compounds the lab looked for, so figures from different labs and methods are hard to compare.
Sources
- Brown et al., 2017, Clinical Pharmacokinetics
- Gotvaldová et al., 2022, International Journal of Molecular Sciences
- Barker et al., 2013, Biomedical Chromatography
- Austin et al., 2019, Medical Mycology Case Reports
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