Abstract
Ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) coupled to orthogonal time-of-flight mass spectrometry (TOF) has shown significant promise for the characterization of complex biological mixtures. The enormous complexity of biological samples (e.g., from proteomics) and the need for both biological and technical analysis replicates imposes major challenges for multidimensional separation platforms with regard to both sensitivity and sample throughput. A major potential attraction of the IMS-TOF MS platform is separation speeds exceeding that of conventional condensed-phase separations by orders of magnitude. Known limitations of the IMS-TOF MS platforms that presently mitigate this attraction include the need for extensive signal averaging due to factors that include significant ion losses in the IMS-TOF interface and an ion utilization efficiency of less than approximately 1% with continuous ion sources (e.g., ESI). We have developed a new multiplexed ESI-IMS-TOF mass spectrometer that enables lossless ion transmission through the IMS-TOF as well as a utilization efficiency of >50% for ions from the ESI source. Initial results with a mixture of peptides show a approximately 10-fold increase in signal-to-noise ratio with the multiplexed approach compared to a signal averaging approach, with no reduction in either IMS or TOF MS resolution.