Speaker: Gabriella Weiss, NASA
Topic: Measuring intramolecular carbon isotope distributions in amino acids using Fourier transform mass spectrometry
Date: October 14, 2024
Time: 6:15 pm Dinner, 7:15 pm Presentation
Location: Shimadzu Scientific Instrument, Inc. Training Center 7100 Riverwood Drive, Columbia, MD 21046 (Directions)
Dinner: Please RSVP to Dingyin Tao (owendtao@gmail.com) by Friday, October 11 if you will be attending the dinner.
Abstract: Molecules form via the addition of single atoms or subunits of atoms and measuring the isotopic composition of different parts of a molecule can provide information about its synthesis as well as alteration by biological and abiotic processes. Molecule fragmentation using mass spectrometry is a common form of compound identification and recently, this has been leveraged to investigate the isotopic composition of specific compound moieties. Historically, intramolecular isotope measurements (i.e., position-specific isotope analysis, PSIA) were laborious, requiring large amounts of analyte and specialized instrumentation. Here, we discuss the use of Fourier transform mass spectrometry (FT-MS) for making molecular average and position-specific isotope measurements. FT-MS (i.e., Orbitrap mass spectrometry) permits the measurement of isotope ratios of intact molecules and their fragments without requiring conversion to simple gases like CO 2 . We focus on the analysis of amino acids and how PSIA of amino acids can be used to distinguish biological and abiotic processes.