Solvent Composition Can Have a Measurable Influence on the Ion Mobility-Derived Collision Cross Section of Small Molecules.

Abstract

Ion mobility (IM) is an important analytical technique for increasing identification coverage of metabolites in untargeted studies, especially when integrated into traditional liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry workflows. While there has been extensive work surrounding best practices to obtain and standardize collision cross section (CCS) measurements necessary for comparing across different IM techniques and laboratories, there has been little investigation into experimental factors beyond the mobility separation region that could potentially influence CCS measurements. The first-principles derived CCS of 15 chemical standards were evaluated across 27 aqueous:organic solvent compositions using a high-precision drift tube instrument. A small but measurable dependency of the CCS on the solvent composition was observed, with the larger analytes from this study (m/z > 400) exhibiting a characteristic increase in CCS at the intermediate (40-60%) solvent compositions. Parallels to the behavior of solvent viscosity and protonation site tautomers (protomers) were noted, although the origin of these solvent-dependent CCS trends is as yet unclear. Taken together, these findings document a solvent dependency on CCS, which, while minor (<0.5%), identifies an important need for reporting the solvent system when utilizing CCS in comparative ion mobility studies.