Application of Negative Ion Mass Spectrometry in Amino Acid Analysis

Negative chemical ionization mass spectrometry(NCI-MS) can provide the enhancement in sensitivity in the analysis of amino acids. For molecules which are strongly electron-capturing, NCI-MS has been of amino to have detection limits in the femtomole to attomole() range. Because of the selectivity of the ionization process, background noise is diminished, further enhancing signal to noise ratio. In this paper, we explored a dinitro-phenyl derivatives of amino acids by NCI-MS and compared it with eletron ionization method. The results demonstrated NCI-MS produces very clean spectra with a very little noise.