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A novel method based on ultrasound-assisted EESI-MS has been developed and applied to rapidly detect the presence of melamine in raw milk, wheat gluten and milk powder with no or minor sample pre-treatment; the high sample throughput and figures of merit make it specially useful for screening melamine levels well below the current safety limit in various food matrices.

Using a 'Particle-In-Cell' approach taken from plasma physics we have developed a new threedimensional (3D) parallel computer code that today yields the highest possible accuracy of ion trajectory calculations in electromagnetic fields. This approach incorporates coulombic ion-ion and ion-image charge interactions into the calculation. The accuracy is achieved through the implementation of an improved algorithm (the so-called Boris algorithm) that mathematically eliminates cyclotron motion in a magnetic field from digital equations for ion motion dynamics. It facilitates the calculation of the cyclotron motion without numerical errors. At every time-step in the simulation the electric potential inside the cell is calculated by direct solution of Poisson's equation. Calculations are performed on a computational grid with up to 128 T 128 T 128 nodes using a fast Fourier transform algorithm. The ion populations in these simulations ranged from 1000 up to 1 000 000 ions. A maximum of 3 000 000 time-steps were employed in the ion trajectory calculations. This corresponds to an experimental detection time-scale of seconds. In addition to the ion trajectories integral time-domain signals and mass spectra were calculated. The phenomena observed include phase locking of particular m/z ions (high-resolution regime) inside larger ion clouds. A focus was placed on behavior of a cloud of ions of a single m/z value to understand the nature of Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance (FTICR) resolution and mass accuracy in selected ion mode detection. The behavior of two and three ion clouds of different but close m/z was investigated as well. Peak coalescence effects were observed in both cases. Very complicated ion cloud dynamics in the case of three ion clouds was demonstrated. It was found that magnetic field does not influence phase locking for a cloud of ions of a single m/z. The ion cloud evolution time-scale is inversely proportional to magnetic field. The number of ions needed for peak coalescence depends quadratically on the magnetic field. Copyright # 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.The leading role Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry (FTICR-MS) plays in biological mass spectrometry is directly related to its unsurpassed resolution and mass accuracy combined with the possibility of utilizing all known ionization and fragmentation methods. Further improvement of mass accuracy will be greatly facilitated by a more detailed understanding of the motion of ions during ion introduction into the FTICR cell, excitation of their cyclotron motion, fragmentation and detection of induced signal. Starting from the early days of FTICR-MS the theory of ion motion in the ICR cell was an important research topic in this field. The dynamics of single particles inside the FTICR trap was analyzed by many groups in both the FTICR and physics communities. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] The FTICR community has been interested mainly in obtaining a calibration formula, which connects measured frequency with ion mass. 9 The e...

Extractive electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (EESI-MS) for real-time monitoring of organic chemical reactions was demonstrated for a well-established pharmaceutical process reaction and a widely used acetylation reaction in the presence of a nucleophilic catalyst, 4-dimethylaminopyridine (4-DMAP). EESI-MS provides real-time information that allows us to determine the optimum time for terminating the reaction based on the relative intensities of the precursors and products. In addition, tandem mass spectrometric (MS/MS) analysis via EESI-MS permits on-line validation of proposed reaction intermediates. The simplicity and rapid response of EESI-MS make it a valuable technique for on-line characterization and full control of chemical and pharmaceutical reactions, resulting in maximized product yield and minimized environmental costs.

Electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESI-MS) is a powerful analytical method to study biomolecules and noncovalent complexes. The prerequisite for their intact observation is soft ionization. In ESI, the internal energy of ions is primarily influenced by collisional activation in the source. The survival yield method is frequently used to probe the energy deposition in ions during the electrospray process. In the present work, we investigate the fragmentation pathways of para-substituted benzylpyridinium ions, the most widely used "thermometer ions" in the survival yield method. In addition to the C-N bond cleavage, alternative fragmentation channels were found for the compounds studied. We consider these pathways to result from intramolecular rearrangements. The effect of these additional fragments on the accuracy of the internal energy calibration is estimated for both collision-cell and in-source collision-induced dissociation (CID). Altogether, results presented suggest that a correction of the energy scale is necessary for the method based on benzylpyridinium ions to precisely quantify ion internal energies. (J Am Soc Mass Spectrom 2010, 21, 172-177) © 2010 American Society for Mass Spectrometry E lectrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESI-MS) [1] is widely used to characterize various species, from small organic compounds [2] to large supramolecular assemblies of biopolymers [3]. In the ESI source, small charged droplets containing dissolved analyte are produced at atmospheric pressure. As the droplets migrate along a voltage gradient to the low-pressure region of the mass spectrometer, solvent evaporates, releasing unsolvated ions. Ions produced in the ion source undergo collisions with ambient gas molecules and thereby accumulate internal energy. Such collisional activation often results in fragmentation and/or rearrangement of ions [4,5]. The effect is more pronounced for weak interactions, such as those involved in noncovalent complexes, which are widely studied by ESI-MS [5]. In addition, for instruments with restricted MS/MS capabilities, so-called in-source CID is frequently the only way to obtain structural information on the parent ions. In-source CID strongly depends on instrument parameter settings and experimental conditions, thus resulting in poor reproducibility of the MS/MS spectra [5]. Internal energy deposition in ions generally affects the mass spectra. It is therefore important to control the ion internal energy for many applications, such as optimizing the molecular ion abundance, structure determination, differentiation of isomers, MS n experiments, and in the study of non-ovalent complexes [5].The survival yield method was introduced to calibrate the internal energy distribution of ions after collisional activation [6,7]. In this method, compounds with a simple and well known dissociation pattern, so-called thermometer ions, are used to probe the energy uptake due to the activation process. The survival yield is the ratio of the parent ion intensity to the sum of parent and f...