A Brief History of Mass Spectrometry

Abstract

MS was “invented” during the hunt for the electron, but it has come a long way since then. Jennifer Griffiths traces the history of the technique and highlights some of the great MS achievements during the past century.

Mass Informatics: From Mass Spectrometry Peaks to Biological Pathways

“…Mass spectrometry is a relatively old analytical measurement technique, [4] which has its roots in physics but has over the years found increasing use in chemistry and the life sciences. In a sense, mass spectrometry can claim to be the natural analytical technique of choice for all biologically relevant molecules, since the fundamental purpose of the technique is to measure the mass of an ion.…”

Structure elucidation of indole–indoline type alkaloids: A retrospective account from the point of view of current NMR and MS technology

“…Numerous works (e.g. [9][10][11]) summarize the astonishing developments of these techniques during the last few decades, as a result of which NMR and MS together can often allow the unambiguous determination of an unknown bisindole even if it is available only in minute quantities.…”

A combined A431 cell membrane chromatography and online high performance liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry method for screening compounds from total alkaloid of Radix Caulophylli acting on the human EGFR

“…However, there is little information about the screening models for directly finding out active compounds or components from a complex sample such as medicinal herbs. Since the 1990s, LC/MS methods have been widely used in life science to analyze complex samples [20]. With an increasing analytical requirement, the multi-dimensional HPLC (MD-HPLC), such as the common two-dimensional HPLC, has been established and used to separate medicinal herbs [21,22].…”