Pyrolysis mass spectrometry and its applications in biotechnology

Pyrolysis mass spectrometry is a rapid and high-resolution method for the analysis of otherwise non-volatile material and has been widely applied for discriminating between closely related microbial strains. Recent advances in statistical and neural network methods based on supervised learning have now permitted exploitation of pyrolysis mass spectrometry in the quantitative analysis of many diverse samples of biotechnological interest; the technique may thus be regarded as an 'anything-sensor'.