It's getting hot out here

摘要

Ambient thermal dissociation generates fragments outside the mass spectrometer.In the world of fragmentation methods for protein and peptide MS, collision-induced dissociation (CID) has long been king. But recently, several alternative methods, including electron capture dissociation and electron transfer dissociation, have been developed that may soon force CID to share its throne. These complementary methods have provided valuable information about ionic species by giving different patterns of fragment-ion intensities when compared with CID. Now, R. Graham Cooks and colleagues at Purdue University have introduced a new fragmentation method called ambient thermal dissociation that reports on unique ionic species and, for the first time, allows researchers to isolate and reionize neutral fragments at ambient pressure outside of the mass spectrometer (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2007, 129, 5880-5886).