Current Trends in Mass Spectrometry

Biography

Biography: Clemens Schwarzinger

Abstract

Polymer mass spectrometry, especially MALDI-ToF MS, has gained a lot of attention in the last years because of the high amount of information that can be gained, such as molar mass distribution, repeat units, end groups, etc. But care must be taken when it comes to sample preparation, especially when the simple and fast “dried droplet” technique is used. As most people have already experienced dried droplet preparation tends to from rings of higher concentration at the outer rim, the so called “coffee rings”, which results in inhomogeneous distribution of the compounds and therefore questionable results. We will show that several rather simples steps can be used to circumvent this phenomenon and how to produce reliable high quality data using dried droplets, as there are the use of ionic liquids as matrices or higher matrix concentration. The results were monitored with imaging techniques such as FTIR or mass spectrometric imaging to understand the processes necessary for a perfect sample preparation. When it comes to copolymers things are getting even worse. In this case it is mostly necessary to separate the polymer into fractions either by precipitation or by SEC. We have found that a modified Electrospray interface coupled to the SEC is a very efficient and elegant way yielding best results in terms of polymer separation and MALDI sample preparation.