PREPARATIVE SEPARATION OF MIXTURES BY MASS SPECTROMETRY

摘要

The present invention provides an instrument and methods for the preparative separation of components of mixtures using mass spectrometric methods. Nondestructive ionization methods are employed to generate ionized components of a mixture, the ionized components are spatially separated by mass and the mass-separated ion components are trapped. The invention provides a multichannel mass separator comprising an electrospray ionizer, an acceleration lens (41), and electrostatic analyzer (20), a magnetic analyzer, a deceleration lens (29), and a collection array (30). The ion source and mass spectrometric techniques employed allow the generation of large ion currents of ion components, on the order of nanoamps, which facilitate rapid accumulation of nanomole quantities of mass-separated components in relatively short times (minutes to hours).