Instrumental developments in organic mass spectrometry

Abstract

Mass spectrometry is a conglomerate of numerous technical and methodological approaches and recently, new developments in all its fields occur rather frequent. The stimulation has at least two different major sources: on the one hand the requirements in environmental analytical chemistry enforce an increasing sensitivity accompanied by the necessity to construct small, affordable spectrometers. On the other hand, modern biochemistry needs not only sensitivity, but new, compatible inlet techniques to solve the analytical problems in biotechnology, molecular biology and medical sciences. Consequently, small detectors for gas and liquid chromatography with almost inconceivable sensitivity and high performance spectrometers to handle large molecules up to several ten thousand daltons have been developed. New desorption techniques with atom and ion beams or lasers have been designed, several new chromatographic techniques are now compatible with MS, only to name capillary zone electrophoresis, isotachophoresis and even thin layer chromatography. Todays analyzers are small quadrupoles or ion traps, time of flight instruments, ion cyclotrons or arrangement of electrostatic and magnetic sector fields in numerous possible orders and combinations (MS/MS). Very recently, even the detector systems experience a revolution from the electron multipliers to simultaneous detection systems based on array detector devices, which improves the detection capability by orders of magnitude particularly for the analysis of large molecules such as biopolymers.