A pilot study of natural-abundance, high-precision isotope ratio analysis by FT-ICR mass spectrometry
EMSL Project ID
50068
Abstract
The abundances of naturally occurring rare stable isotopes (e.g., D, 13C, 15N, 18O) are widely used as constraints for problems concerned with the origins, transport and fates of molecules in natural and engineered systems. Newly developed high-resolution, high-precision mass spectrometers let us study molecular isotopic structure sensitivity sufficient for studies of multiply substituted species and reasonably small samples. However, unable to use the mass spectrometric approach to describe the isotopic anatomies of key classes of biomolecules larger than ~300-500 amu. I propose to perform a pilot study of the potential for the 21T FT-ICR instrument at PNNL to perform high precision (est. ±1 ‰) measurements of the proportions of singly and multiply substituted isotopologues of organic molecules, with the goal of establishing fundamental figures of merit for the capacity of this system to resolve and quantify proportions of isotopologues.
Project Details
Project type
Limited Scope
Start Date
2017-10-17
End Date
2017-12-17
Status
Closed
Released Data Link
Team
Principal Investigator