Surface-induced dissociation of peptide ions: kinetics and dynamics

Kinetics and dynamics studies have been carried out for the surface-induced dissociation (SID) of a set of model peptides utilizing a specially designed electrospray ionization Fourier Transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometer in which mass-selected and vibrationally relaxed ions are collided on a orthogonally-mounted fluorinated self-assembled monolayer on Au [111] crystal. The sampling time in this apparatus can be varied from hundreds of microseconds to tens of seconds, enabling the investigation of kinetics of ion decomposition over an extended range of decomposition rates. RRKM-based modeling of these reactions for a set of polyalanines demonstrates that SID kinetics of these simple peptides is very similar to slow, multiple-collision activation and that the distribution of internal energies following collisional activation is indistinguishable from a thermal distribution. For more complex peptides comprised of several amino acids and with internal degrees of freedom (DOF) of the order of 350 there is a dramatic change in kinetics in which RRKM kinetics is no longer capable of describing the decomposition of these complex ions. A combination of RRKM kinetics and the "sudden death" approximation, according to which decomposition occurs instantaneously, is a satisfactory description. This implies that a population of ions-which is dependant on the nature of the peptide, kinetic energy and sampling time-decomposes on or very near the surface. The shattering transition is described quantitatively for the limited set of molecules examined to date.