NIST · NIST AI
Now, NIST has published the latest update to that library, which industry experts
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The expanded library, formally known as Standard Reference Database 1A, contains mass spectra measured from hundreds of thousands of compounds.
Key facts
- Roughly 35,000 new compounds have been added to this library, for a total of over 382,180
- This library has 17,000 new compounds for a total of 68,635 substances
- as a person may be identified by comparing their DNA to a database, a chemical compound may be identified by comparing its mass spectrum to the NIST database,” said Bill Wallace, group leader
- Now, NIST has released the latest update to that library, which industry experts, forensic scientists and others have used since 1988 to identify unknown substances in food, drugs, cosmetics
Summary
Whether you’re a researcher stumped by a mystery compound or a manufacturer perplexed by an unknown substance, there’s a major resource you can rely on: a library of chemical fingerprints, known as mass spectra, that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has maintained for decades. Now, NIST has released the latest update to that library, which industry experts, forensic scientists and others have used since 1988 to identify unknown substances in food, drugs, cosmetics, the environment and even space rocks. NIST scientists generate chemical fingerprints using a mass spectrometer, an instrument that ionizes and shatters a compound into charged fragments and then sorts those fragments by their mass-to-charge ratio. Researchers and manufacturers can use mass spectrometry to create their own bar chart of a mystery substance and run it through the NIST library to find a match.