Mass spectrometry allows rapid chemical analysis of untreated samples in the ambient environment. This is a result of recent rapid progress in ambient ionization techniques. The most widely studied of these new methods, desorption electrospray ionization (DESI), uses fast-moving solvent droplets to extract analytes from surfaces and propel the resulting secondary microdroplets towards the mass analyzer. Manipulation of the chemistry accompanying ambient ionization can be used to optimize chemical analysis, including molecular imaging. Solvent effects, geometry effects, electrochemical processes and mechanisms are covered. Extensions of the methodology to reactive DESI for in-situ chemical derivatization and ambient hydrogen/deuterium (H/D) exchange of pharmaceutical compounds as well as other recent pharmaceutical applications (including DESI-imaging, direct analysis of oligonucleotides in salts and biotransformation reaction mixtures in biological matrices) are presented. Potential applications of DESI for coupling LC and MS are also discussed.

Ambient mass spectrometry: New directions in pharmaceutical analysis

244th National Meeting (2012)

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