The concept of the diffusion calibration for accurate drift time measurement by traveling wave ion mobilty

Ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) is a gas phase separation technique which relies on differences in the collisional cross section (CCS) of ions. Ionic clouds of unresolved conformers overlapped if the CCS difference is below the instrumental resolution expressed as Ω/ΔΩ. The experimental arrival time distribution (ATD) peak is then a superimposition of the various contributions weighted by their relative intensities. We have developed a strategy for accurate drift time determination using traveling wave ion mobility spectrometry (TWIMS) of poorly and unresolved conformers. This method implements through a calibration procedure the link between the peak full width at half maximum (FWHM) and the drift time of model compounds for wide range of settings for wave heights and velocities. We modified a Gaussian equation which achieves the deconvolution of ATD peaks where the FWHM is fixed according to our calibration procedure. The new fitting Gaussian equation only depends on two parameters: The apex of the peak (A) and the mean drift time value (µ). The standard deviation parameter (correlated to FWHM) becomes a function of the drift time. This correlation function between µ and FWHM is obtained using the TWIMS calibration procedure which determines the maximum instrumental ion beam diffusion using ionic compounds which are detected as single conformers in the gas phase. This deconvolution process has been used to highlight the presence of poorly resolved conformers for couples of crown ethers and peptides leading to CCS determination in better agreement with quantum chemistry predictions

Toxicokinetics of selenium in the slider turtle Trachemys scripta

Selenium (Se) is an essential element that can be harmful for wildlife. However, its toxicity in poikilothermic amniotes, including turtles, remains poorly investigated. The present study aims at identifying selenium toxicokinetics and toxicity in juvenile slider turtles (age: 7 months), Trachemys scripta, dietary exposed to selenium, as selenomethionine SeMet, for eight weeks. Non-destructive tissues (i.e. carapace, scutes, skin and blood) were further tested for their suitability to predict selenium levels in target tissues (i.e. kidney, liver and muscle) From conservation perspective. 130 juvenile yellow-bellied slider turtles were assigned in three groups of 42 individuals each (i.e. control, SeMet1 and SeMet2). These groups were subjected to a feeding trial including an eight-week supplementation period SP8 and a following four-week elimination period EP4. During the SP8, turtles fed on diet containing 1.1 ± 0.04, 22.1 ± 1.0 and 45.0 ± 2.0 µg.g-1 of selenium (control, SeMet1 and SeMet2, respectively). During the EP4, turtles fed on non-supplemented diet. At different time during the trial, six individuals per group were sacrificed and tissues collected (i.e. carapace, scutes, skin, blood, liver, kidney, muscle) for analyses. During the SP8 (Figure 1), both SeMet1 and SeMet2 turtles efficiently accumulated selenium from a SeMet dietary source. The more selenium was concentrated in the food, the more it was in the turtle body but the less it was removed from their tissues. Moreover, SeMet was found to be the more abundant selenium species in turtles’ tissues. Body condition (i.e. growth in mass and size, feeding behaviour and activity) and survival of the SeMet1 and SeMet2 turtles seemed to be unaffected by the selenium exposure. There were clear evidences that reptilian species are differently affected by and sensitive to selenium exposure but the lack of any adverse effects was quite unexpected

Towards Lipidomics of Low-Abundant Species for Exploring Tumor Heterogeneity Guided by High-Resolution Mass Spectrometry Imaging

Many studies have evidenced the main role of lipids in physiological and also pathological processes such as cancer, diabetes or neurodegenerative diseases. The identification and the in situ localization of specific low-abundant lipid species involved in cancer biology are still challenging for both fundamental studies and lipid marker discovery. In this paper, we report the identification and the localization of specific isobaric minor phospholipids in human breast cancer xenografts by FTICR MALDI imaging supported by histochemistry. These potential candidates can be further confirmed by liquid chromatography coupled with electrospray mass spectrometry (LC-ESI-MS) after extraction from the region of interest defined by MALDI imaging. Finally, this study highlights the importance of characterizing the heterogeneous distribution of low-abundant lipid species, relevant in complex histological samples for biological purposes.Peer reviewe

Sliding Windows in Ion Mobility (SWIM): A New Approach to Increase the Resolving Power in Trapped Ion Mobility-Mass Spectrometry Hyphenated with Chromatography.

peer reviewedOver the past decade, the separation efficiency achieved by linear IMS instruments has increased substantially, with state-of-the-art IM technologies, such as the trapped ion mobility (TIMS), the cyclic traveling wave ion mobility (cTWIMS), and the structure for lossless ion manipulation (SLIM) platforms commonly demonstrating resolving powers in excess of 200. However, for complex sample analysis that require front end separation, the achievement of such high resolving power in TIMS is significantly hampered, since the ion mobility range must be broad enough to analyze all the classes of compounds of interest, whereas the IM analysis time must be short enough to cope with the time scale of the preseparation technique employed. In this paper, we introduce the concept of sliding windows in ion mobility (SWIM) for chromatography hyphenated TIMS applications that bypasses the need to use a wide and fixed IM range by using instead narrow and mobile ion mobility windows that adapt to the analytes' ion mobility during chromatographic separation. GC-TIMS-MS analysis of a mixture of 174 standards from several halogenated persistent organic pollutant (POP) classes, including chlorinated and brominated dioxins, biphenyls, and PBDEs, demonstrated that the average IM resolving power could be increased up to 40% when the SWIM mode was used, thereby greatly increasing the method selectivity for the analysis of complex samples

Geometric Analysis of Shapes in Ion Mobility-Mass Spectrometry.

peer reviewedExperimental ion mobility-mass spectrometry (IM-MS) results are often correlated to three-dimensional structures based on theoretical chemistry calculations. The bottleneck of this approach is the need for accurate values, both experimentally and theoretically predicted. Here, we continue the development of the trend-based analyses to extract structural information from experimental IM-MS data sets. The experimental collision cross-sections (CCSs) of synthetic systems such as homopolymers and small ionic clusters are investigated in terms of CCS trends as a function of the number of repetitive units (e.g., degree of polymerization (DP) for homopolymers) and for each detected charge state. Then, we computed the projected areas of expanding but perfectly defined geometric objects using an in-house software called MoShade. The shapes were modeled using computer-aided design software where we considered only geometric factors: no atoms, mass, chemical potentials, or interactions were taken into consideration to make the method orthogonal to classical methods for 3D shape assessments using time-consuming computational chemistry. Our modeled shape evolutions favorably compared to experimentally obtained CCS trends, meaning that the apparent volume or envelope of homogeneously distributed mass effectively modeled the ion-drift gas interactions as sampled by IM-MS. The CCSs of convex shapes could be directly related to their surface area. More importantly, this relationship seems to hold even for moderately concave shapes, such as those obtained by geometry-optimized structures of ions from conventional computational chemistry methods. Theoretical sets of expanding beads-on-a-string shapes allowed extracting accurate bead and string dimensions for two homopolymers, without modeling any chemical interactions

Effet de la stabilité du courrant total d'ion en imagerie FT-ICR à harmonisation dynamique

Mass spectrometry imaging of complex biological samples often require high spectral resolution and mass accuracy to properly distinguish all isobaric compounds. To achieve such requirement dynamically harmonized FT-ICR analysers offer best results. However, mass accuracy below expectation due to masses shifting between pixels observed when performing image acquisitions. In this work we show a link between the mass shifting phenomenon andd the large variations observed in total ion current during image acquisitions. This work propose solve the mass shift by optimisation in sample preparation and acquisition parameters to stabilise the fluctuation of the total ion current in FT-ICR-MSI.EURLIPID