Abstract (eng)
The present work deals with the evaluation of a relatively new commercially available
instrument. The instrument concerned is a drift-tube ion mobility (IMS) combined
with a quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometer (QTOF). The IMS is based on the
principle of drift time ion mobility separation of ions relating to their shape-to-charge
of ions. Drift time is the time an ion needs to pass through the IMS drift tube and is
determined by different parameters, that are explained within the work. Throughout
the work, it is a primary goal to estimate the value of this approach for the analysis of
plant extracts containing a high concentration of phenolic secondary metabolites (e.g.
flavanoids). To have suitable tests samples, which were easy to obtain and required low
cost preparation, wine was chosen as a prototype of phenolic plant extracts.
The repeatability and the reliability of the results were checked by repeated measurements
of the same wine samples. Above all comparison of the data processing of
liquid chromatography in combination with ion mobility-time-of-flight-mass spectrometry
(LC-IM-QTOF) and LC-QTOF alone, was aimed at. To allow this, three wines were
checked by alignment of the extracted data for differences. High value was placed into
the other part of the work; the calibration of the device concerning the drift time and
the collisional cross section (CCS) determination for some of the ions. In the last part
of the work, the additional data acquired by the IMS is used with some qualitative
examples from targeted compounds to demonstrate the type of information that can be
included in a full-scale LC-IM-(Q)TOF workflow.
A major conclusion of this work is that the additional separation and feature
alignment utility of IMS will be valuable for both targeted and (possibly) non-targeted
analytical workflows for phenolic extracts. Nevertheless, some optimization and investigation
into further elements are still required. Some suggested further work to address
these issues is suggested at the end of this thesis.