Abstract
Mass analyses have been carried out on ions produced by an Electrospray (ES) source from dilute solutions of protein molecules with molecular weights (M) in the range from 5000 to nearly 40000. Each spectrum comprises a sequence of peaks corresponding to multiply charged intact parent species. The ions of each peak differ from those of their adjacent neighbors by one unit charge, H+ in these experiments. The maximum number of charges per ion generally increases with the molecular weight of the parent molecule, reaching a value of 45 in the case of alcohol dehydrogenase, atM=39830 the largest species in this study. Thus the resulting values ofm/z are within reach of a simple quadrupole mass filter whose nominal upper mass limit is 1500 daltons! The immediate application for the ES source is in mass spectrometric analysis of large fragile molecules of biochemical importance. But the multiply charged ions it produces are newcomers to the laboratory scene that constitute interesting subjects for study.
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