Mass Spectrometry of Synthetic Polymers

摘要

The aim of this review is to give a compact overview about the literature on mass spectrometry (MS) of polymers published during 2006/2007. The citations are drawn from SciFinder January 25, 2008, using the search terms "poly~(*)" and "mass spectrometry" with restrictions to review and journal contributions in the English language including refined searches in Web of Science. More than 750 relevant papers, reviews, (1, 2) and historical summaries (3, 4) were published in these two years, demonstrating the importance of MS for polymer analysis. We were therefore forced to select the most important references. This is always a subjective decision and may not always represent the best choices. In contrast to the previous review in this series (5), which focused on MS principles, including matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI) time-of-flight (TOF), electrospray ionization (ESI) TOF, TOF secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS), etc., in this paper, we categorize according to applications of MS for polymer analysis. Even this choice is arbitrary. The main chapters are focused on New Techniques and Principles, Polymer Synthesis, Copolymer Analysis, Fragmentation Techniques, Polymer Degradation, and Polymer Surface and Interface. Due to their comprehensiveness and complexity, clear classification of some papers to a single category is difficult. Thus, Copolymer Analysis exclusively deals with the determination of the copolymer composition, whereas the synthesis of copolymers is described in Polymer Synthesis. Sometimes, making a clear decision between synthetic polymers and biopolymers, because both fields strongly overlap, is difficult. Typical examples for this overlap are papers of Boyer et al. (6) on the synthesis of well-defined protein-polymer conjugates via in situ reversible addition-fragmentation chain-transfer (RAFT) polymerization and also poly(ether-urethane) biobased sugar diols by Beldi et al. (7).