Gas Chromatography/Atmospheric Pressure Chemical Ionization-Time of Flight Mass Spectrometry: Analytical Validation and Applicability to Metabolic Profiling

Abstract

Gas Chromatography (GC)-Mass Spectrometry (MS) with Atmospheric Pressure (AP) interface was introduced more than 30 years ago but never became a mainstream technique, mainly because of technical difficulties and cost of instrumentation. A recently introduced multipurpose AP source created the opportunity to reconsider the importance of AP ionization for GC. Here, we present an analytical evaluation of GC/APCI-MS showing the benefits of soft atmospheric pressure chemical ionization for GC in combination with a Time of Flight (TOF) mass analyzer. During this study, the complete analytical procedure was optimized and evaluated with respect to characteristic analytical parameters, such as repeatability, reproducibility, linearity, and detection limits. Limits of detection (LOD) were found within the range from 11.8 to 72.5 nM depending on the type of compound. The intraday and interday repeatability tests demonstrate relative standard deviations (RSDs) of peak areas between 0.7%-2.1% and 3.8%-6.4% correspondingly. Finally, we applied the developed method to the analysis of human cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) samples to check the potential of this new analytical combination for metabolic profiling.

Gas chromatography coupled to atmospheric pressure ionization mass spectrometry (GC-API-MS): Review

“…Metabolomics encounters an enormous analytical challenge, resulting from cover a wide range of polarities, concentrations, and sizes of chemical entities composing the metabolome [107]. GC/MS is the major analytical platform in plant metabolomics and is also applied for metabolomics studies in clinical biomarker discovery, disease diagnosis etc.…”

“…GC/MS is the major analytical platform in plant metabolomics and is also applied for metabolomics studies in clinical biomarker discovery, disease diagnosis etc. [108]. GC/MS is mainly used with electron impact (EI) and chemical ionization (CI) in combination with spectral libraries for compound identification.…”

Application of gas chromatography–(triple quadrupole) mass spectrometry with atmospheric pressure chemical ionization for the determination of multiclass pesticides in fruits and vegetables

“…Application studies including pharmaceutical development [18], profiling of phenolic compounds in oil [19], metabolic profiling [20] and pesticide residue analysis [21], most of them using GC-(APCI) TOF MS, can be found since 2009. Recently, we investigated the potential of APCI in GC-triple quadrupole MS for wide-scope pesticide residue analysis [22] and [23].…”

Hyphenated Techniques in Gas Chromatography

“…It has also been successfully applied in metabolomics. As an example, GC-TOF-MS coupled to an APCI source was applied to human cerebrospinal fluid for metabolic profiling (Carrasco-Pancorbo et al, 2009). Moreover, the use of GC×GC coupled to TOF-MS for the metabolic profiling of biological fluids has been discussed in a recent review (Pasikanti et al, 2008).…”