Application of Field Desorption and Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry for Glycolipid Analysis

Abstract

Glycolipids are well known cell membrane components and play a role in several biological phenomena on the cell surface.¹ As glycolipids are relatively minor components of cells, it is necessary to develop analytical methods for small amounts of samples. Mass spectrometry have proved to be powerful tools for this purpose. Electron impact and chemical ionization mass spectrometry provide good information on the structure of permethylated or permethylated and reduced glycolipids.^2–4 However, these ionization methods require the derivatization of the sample, and the ion intensities of the high mass region are very weak and difficult to detect continuously during analysis. The recently introduced “soft ionization techniques” are successfully applied for the analyses of non-volatile and thermolabile compounds. These include field desorption (FD), fast atom bombardment (FAB) and secondary ion mass spectrometry (SI-MS). However only a few reports on the application of these new techniques for the analysis of glycolipids^5–11 have been published.