Quinones serve as redox active cofactors in bacterial photosynthetic reaction centers: photosystem I, photosystem II, cytochrome bc 1, and cytochrome b 6 f. In particular, ubiquinone is ubiquitous in animals and most bacteria and plays a key role in several cellular processes, e.g., mitochondrial electron transport. Their experimentally measured redox potential values for one-electron reduction E m(Q/Q·−) were already reported in dimethylformamide (DMF) versus saturated calomel electrode but not in water versus normal hydrogen electrode (NHE). We calculated E m(Q/Q·−) of 1,4-quinones using a quantum chemical approach. The calculated energy differences of reduction of Q to Q·− in DMF and water for 1,4-quinone derivatives correlated highly with the experimentally measured E m(Q/Q·−) in DMF and water, respectively. E m(Q/Q·−) were calculated to be −163 mV for ubiquinone, −260 mV for menaquinone and phylloquinone, and −154 mV for plastoquinone in water versus NHE.

The concept of three-dimensional (3D) shave-off secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) is that enables to obtain the depth information of the sample simultaneously with the mass information using the vertical axis of a two-dimensional position-sensitive detector in the mass analyzer. In this study, we simulated the trajectory of secondary ions sputtered from a virtual sample in the 3D shave-off SIMS system and investigated the magnification ratio of the ions. The simulation results showed that we could distinguish the depth position of the secondary ions sputtered from a sample by the detected position in our concept of 3D shave-off SIMS.