Macromolecular ion accelerator.
Presented herein are the development of macromolecular ion accelerator (MIA) and the results obtained by MIA. This new instrument utilizes a consecutive series of planar electrodes for the purpose of facilitating stepwise acceleration. Matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI) is employed to generate singly charged macromolecular ions. A regular Z-gap microchannel plate (MCP) detector is mounted at the end of the accelerator to record the ion signals. In this work, we demonstrated the detection of ions with the mass-to-charge (m/z) ratio reaching 30,000,000. Moreover, we showed that singly charged biomolecular ions can be accelerated with the voltage approaching 1 MV, offering the evidence that macromolecular ions can possess much higher kinetic energy than ever before.
Genomics Research Center, Academia Sinica, Nankang, Taipei, Taiwan.
Yun-Fei
YF
Hsu
Jung-Lee
JL
Lin
Szu-Hsueh
SH
Lai
Ming-Lee
ML
Chu
Yi-Sheng
YS
Wang
Chung-Hsuan
CH
Chen