Book Description

A 7-Tesla Fourier transform ion-cyclotron resonance (FTICR) mass spectrometer was modified to insert a surface inside the cell for ion-surface collisions leading to the dissociation of impacting ions. Modifications were made to the software/hardware to collide the ions brought into the cell and trap the resulting fragment and undissociated primary ions inside the cell. The trapping plates were also ramped to determine kinetic energy distributions of these ions. The surface-induced dissociation (SID) of benzene and chromium hexacarbonyl ions was first studied as test cases for the instrument. Then a systematic study of the SID of small protonated peptides formed by electrospray ionization was begun. A series of small alanine(A)-containing peptides, viz., AA, AAA, AAAA, AAAAA, and PAAAA were used in the study. In the absence of any direct comparisons of the SID processes with the commonly used technique of tandem mass spectrometry of collision-induced dissociations (CID) via collisions with a neutral gas, a comparative study of CID and SID using the same protonated peptides was made. Since multiple collisions are often used to enhance dissociation efficiency in CID, the CID was performed under single as well as multiple collisional activation conditions. Both on-resonance and sustained off-resonance irradiation excitation were used for CID experiments. Kinetic energy of the ions was varied by changing peak-to-peak voltage applied to the excitation plates. Results are shown in a series of graphs, and a simple theoretical model is presented. This direct comparison of the two activation techniques on the same instrument provided insights into the similarities and differences between these two. The results suggest that internal energy distributions of ions activated by ion-surface collision and multiple collision ion-gaseous neutral collisions are quite comparable. The results also suggest that, in ion-surface collisions, the ion collides with only a small fraction of th e self-assembled monolayer chain, making it effectively a process very similar to CID.