Oct. 20, 2009 (PR Newswire) --

MILFORD, Mass., Oct. 20 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Waters Corporation (NYSE: WAT) announced today that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN), College Park, MD recently purchased nine Waters® ACQUITY UltraPerformance LC® (UPLC®) Systems to support its priority to protect the U.S. food supply by monitoring domestically-produced and imported food sold in interstate commerce. The new instruments will be placed within CFSAN's Office of Regulatory Science for developing and validating robust and reproducible methods for testing food additives, pesticide residues, dietary supplements, mycotoxins, vitamins, seafood toxins, industrial chemicals, and regulated food and cosmetic products.

FDA scientists chose the Waters ACQUITY UPLC Systems based on the need for liquid chromatography instrumentation with the required resolution, sensitivity, and speed to meet the ever-increasing challenges of modern multi-residue analysis. The agency's College Park laboratories are currently equipped with three ACQUITY UPLC Systems along with two nanoACQUITY UPLC® Systems, several of which are paired with mass spectrometers for analyte quantification and identity confirmation. The additional UPLC systems will add to the capacity of the FDA's laboratories to develop additional methods and give a larger number of investigators access to the state-of-the-art technology.

The FDA's Office of Regulatory Science develops liquid chromatography (LC) and liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (LC/MS) based methods of analyzing foods and sharing their expertise with other FDA field laboratories. The methods are essential for carrying out many agency duties including pre-market approval of new food additives, risk assessment and setting of priorities, coordinated enforcement and compliance with pesticide tolerances set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), surveillance, and outbreak response.

The Food and Drug Administration is responsible for the safety of 80% of the food consumed in the United States excluding meat, poultry, and processed egg products which are regulated by the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service. CFSAN's mission is to protect public health by making sure the nation's food supply is safe, secure, sanitary, wholesome, and properly labeled.

Liquid chromatography (LC) is a vital tool for separating out the constituents of test samples whether they are foods and beverages, blood or plasma, drinking water, and drug formulations making it possible to measure their concentrations and confirm their identity.