A high-performance
field asymmetric waveform ion mobility spectrometry
(FAIMS)-IMS-MS platform was developed and applied to explore the conformational
diversity of the singly and doubly charged bradykinin (BK + H+)+ and (BK + 2H+)2+ ions.
With pure N2 as the FAIMS carrier gas, more than ten conformers
of (BK + H+)+ can be resolved using FAIMS-IMS,
as compared to only four conformers resolved using either FAIMS or
IMS alone. Interestingly, multiple conformers of (BK + H+)+ were found to have completely different values of FAIMS
compensation voltage (CV), while their IMS drift times were essentially
the same, which were also proven experimentally to not result from
the structural annealing by the collisional heating in the ion funnel.
The separations in the FAIMS and IMS dimensions are substantially
orthogonal, and the overall resolving power of two-dimensional FAIMS-IMS
separation is largely proportional to the product of the separation
resolving powers of FAIMS and IMS. Using a gas mixture of N2/He to further improve the resolving power of the FAIMS separation,
the total resolving powers of the combined FAIMS and IMS separation
were estimated to be about 1020 and 1400 for (BK + H+)+ and (BK + 2H+)2+ ions, respectively,
which are significantly higher than the resolving power of any ion
mobility-based separation techniques demonstrated so far. The combined
FAIMS-IMS can thus be a much more powerful technique to explore the
structural diversity of biomolecules.