Gas-Phase Dissociation Chemistry of Deprotonated RGD

Supercritical Fluid Nanospray Mass Spectrometry: II. Effects on Ionization

Nanospraying supercritical fluids coupled to a mass spectrometer (nSF-MS) using a 90% supercritical fluid CO₂ carrier (sCO₂) has shown an enhanced desolvation compared to traditional liquid eluents. Capillaries of 25, 50, and 75 μm internal diameter (i.d.) with pulled emitter tips provided high MS detection sensitivity. Presented here is an evaluation of the effect of proton affinity, hydrophobicity, and nanoemitter tip size on the nSF-MS signal. This was done using a set of primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary amines with butyl, hexyl, octyl, and decyl chains as analytes. Each amine class was analyzed individually to evaluate hydrophobicity and proton affinity effects on signal intensity. The system has shown a mass sensitive detection on a linear dynamic range of 0.1-100 μM. Results indicate that hydrophobicity has a larger effect on the signal response than proton affinity. Nanospraying a mixture of all amine classes using the 75 μm emitter has shown a quaternary amine signal not suppressed by competing analytes. Competing ionization was observed for primary, secondary, and tertiary amines. The 75 and 50 μm emitters demonstrated increased signal with increasing hydrophobicity. Surprisingly, the 25 μm i.d. emitter yielded a signal decrease as the alkyl chain length increased, contrary to conventional understanding. Nanospraying the evaporative fluid in a sub-500 nm emitter likely resulted in differences in the ionization mechanism. Results suggest that 90% sCO₂ with 9.99% methanol and 0.01% formic acid yielded fast desolvation, high ionization efficiency, and low matrix effect, which could benefit complex biological matrix analysis.

Dissociation Pattern of Sodiated Amide Peptides as a Tool for De Novo Sequencing

As part of the de novo sequencing issue, new approaches have to be found to sequence small natural peptides (<15-20 residues), which often present amino acid compositions, inducing merely singly charged species, that are quite difficult to thoroughly fragment under low-energy activation conditions in MS/MS experiments. Cationization by alkali metals, like Na⁺, followed by collision-induced dissociations (CID) or the postsource metastable decay (PSD) of such cationized molecular ions was found to improve the sequence coverage of native peptides through the formation of [b_n-1 + Na + OH]⁺ ions issued from C-terminal residue exclusion. Concerned by the identification of peptides with a C-terminal amide, the fragmentation pattern of their sodiated molecular ions was investigated. In contrast to the peptides featuring unmodified C-termini, the C-terminal loss did not occur, with the amide function triggering different fragmentation pathways. However, several residues, such as aspartic acid (D), glutamic acid (E), and arginine (R), influenced the dissociation of fixed-charge sodiated ions similarly to protonated peptides; more surprisingly, serine (S), threonine (T), and tyrosine (Y), which exhibit a hydroxyl function on their side chains, showed a very peculiar behavior that could help de novo peptide sequencing.