Design And Application Of Electro-kinetic Assisted Electrospray Ionization

By using intensity of mass-to-charge ratio(m/z),mass spectrum can analyze mass of samples.Including their chemical structure and biological compounds,which is widely apply on many kinds of area: isotopic detection used in criminal investigation and archaeology,structural elucidation used in medical science and agriculture,quantitative analysis of unknown samples can be used in pharmacy,explosives,environmental monitoring and so on.For the mass spectrometry,ionization source is the key part of the whole instrument,which is directly affect the accuracy and sensitivity of the samples.With the rapidly development of the technology,lots of people point out many different ionization source for different kinds of samples.As for liquid samples,the most common ionization method is electrospray ionization(ESI)or Nano-ESI.Those liquid containing the analytes of interest are desolvation by electrospray and become into ion drops that eventually detect by detector.Therefore,in this paper,several electro-kinetic assisted electrospray ionization(EK-ESI)source are proposed and characterized.In EK-ESI,an additional auxiliary electric field is introduced in the liquid flow of a nano-ESI.With the help of this auxiliary electric field,analytes could be separated based on their electrophoretic mobility during the electrospray process.Experiments show that EK-ESI can reduce charge competition effects in the ESI source and increase biomolecule detection sensitivities.It was also found that EK-ESI effectively ionizes proteins without requiring addition of acids into the solvent,which in turn helps to preserve the native structure of biomolecules.Because of all these advantages,EK-ESI could be applied on complex samples like cells to determine the components and other important information.