Role of Projectile and Surface Temperatures in the Energy Transfer Dynamics of Protonated Peptide Ion Collisions with the Diamond {111} Surface

Role of Chemical Dynamics Simulations in Mass Spectrometry Studies of Collision-Induced Dissociation and Collisions of Biological Ions with Organic Surfaces

In this article, a perspective is given of chemical dynamics simulations of collisions of biological ions with surfaces and of collision-induced dissociation (CID) of ions. The simulations provide an atomic-level understanding of the collisions and, overall, are in quite good agreement with experiment. An integral component of ion/surface collisions is energy transfer to the internal degrees of freedom of both the ion and the surface. The simulations reveal how this energy transfer depends on the collision energy, incident angle, biological ion, and surface. With energy transfer to the ion's vibration fragmentation may occur, i.e. surface-induced dissociation (SID), and the simulations discovered a new fragmentation mechanism, called shattering, for which the ion fragments as it collides with the surface. The simulations also provide insight into the atomistic dynamics of soft-landing and reactive-landing of ions on surfaces. The CID simulations compared activation by multiple "soft" collisions, resulting in random excitation, versus high energy single collisions and nonrandom excitation. These two activation methods may result in different fragment ions. Simulations provide fragmentation products in agreement with experiments and, hence, can provide additional information regarding the reaction mechanisms taking place in experiment. Such studies paved the way on using simulations as an independent and predictive tool in increasing fundamental understanding of CID and related processes.

Intermolecular potential for binding of protonated peptide ions with perfluorinated hydrocarbon surfaces

An analytic potential energy function was developed to model both short-range and long-range interactions between protonated peptide ions and perfluorinated hydrocarbon chains. The potential function is defined as a sum of two-body potentials of the Buckingham form. The parameters of the two-body potentials were obtained by fits to intermolecular potential energy curves (IPECs) calculated for CF4, which represents the F and C atoms of a perfluoroalkane chain, interacting with small molecules chosen as representatives of the main functional groups and atoms present in protonated peptide ions: specifically, CH4, NH3, NH4(+), and HCOOH. The IPECs were calculated at the MP2/aug-cc-pVTZ level of theory, with basis set superposition error (BSSE) corrections. Good fits were obtained for an energy range extending up to about 400 kcal/mol. It is shown that the pair potentials derived from the NH3/CF4 and HCOOH/CF4 fits reproduce acceptably well the intermolecular interactions in HCONH2/CF4, which indicates that the parameters obtained for the amine and carbonyl atoms may be transferable to the corresponding atoms of the amide group. The derived potential energy function may be used in chemical dynamics simulations of collisions of peptide-H(+) ions with perfluorinated hydrocarbon surfaces.