NIST Expands Its Library of ‘Chemical Fingerprints’ to Identify Unknown Substances

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. The expanded library, formally known as Standard Reference Database 1A, contains mass spectra measured from hundreds of thousands of compounds. 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. That gives researchers enough information to create a bar-chart-like graph known as a mass spectrum that is unique to that particular chemical. 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. “Just 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 of NIST’s Mass Spectrometry Data Center. Commonly called NIST26, the NIST Mass Spectral Library comes preinstalled on many commercial mass spectrometers. Users can purchase the updated library from their instrument manufacturer or other independent distributors. To ensure that the updated library meets NIST’s standards, NIST scientists use a comprehensive, software-based evaluation process that relies on decades of experience. One of the world’s largest mass spectral databases, the NIST26 library has two main components. The Electron Ionization (EI) Library contains fingerprints of compounds that are easily vaporized. Roughly 35,000 new compounds have been added to this library, for a total of over 382,180. The Tandem Library is used to identify nonvolatile compounds that dissolve in liquids. This library has 17,000 new compounds for a total of 68,635 substances. Compounds added to the new version of the NIST library include: Interested individuals can visit the Mass Spectrometry Data Center’s newly updated website chemdata.nist.gov for more information.