Reactions are the heart and soul of chemistry.1 Pushing the arrow: understanding the reaction mechanisms is a very tactful task as it offers us insights into how molecules react, enable us to manipulate the course of known reactions, aid us in predicting the course of known reactions using new substrates, and help us to develop new reactions and reagents. In order to understand and write reaction mechanisms, trapping of reactive intermediates and its characterization by various analytical techniques has become routine practice to validate the proposed mechanism. Among various analytical techniques, mass spectrometry (MS) is gaining priority as an analytical tool to analytical/organic/pharmaceutical chemists and biologists due to its appealing features like ease of sample preparation, operational simplicity and ease of spectral interpretation. Mass spectrometric technique holds the place at the crucial stage of analysis such as structural confirmation, purity determination, and conversion. Often interpretation/prediction of the desired product depends upon the understanding of the reaction mechanism. The MS techniques particularly ESIMS is a solution provider towards this end through 'ion fishing' of charged species as reactive intermediates.2 However, revealing reaction pathways that proceed through noncovalent short lived species remains the challenging task and MALDI and ESI MS techniques are being increasingly used3-5 for the purpose that adds a new dimension to analytical techniques. This presentation will summarise about a special application of ESI-MS to 'fish' the noncovalent complex/ion directly from solution phase to gas phase that gives insight into the reaction mechanism and proves it on the basis of trapped reactive intermediate.6 References: Eur. J. Mass Spectrom. 2007 , 13, 19.Eur. J. Org. Chem. 2008 , 235.Org. Lett. 2010 , 12, 3866.J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2009 , 131, 6902.Green Chem. 2008 , 10, 1111.Chem. Commun. 2011 , 47, 1797.

Novel tricks for legacy tasks: Probing the reaction mechanism by mass spectrometric identification of supramolecular adducts

243rd National Meeting (2012)

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