Electron-capture dissociation for investigating host/guest complexes of 18-crown-6-ether and peptides

The ionization of a molecule into a molecular ion inside the mass spectrometer causes instability in the molecule's structure due to the loss of an electron. This eventually leads to the fragmentation or breaking of some bonds in the molecule. The fragmentation occurs predominantly at specific bonds to yield relatively stable fragments.
One type of fragmentation pattern is the cleavage of a single bond in the molecular ion. The cleavage leads to a radical and a cation. The cleavage can occur at...

Crown ethers are cyclic polyethers that contain multiple oxygen atoms, usually arranged in a regular pattern. The first crown ether was synthesized by Charles Pederson while working at DuPont in 1967. For this work, Pedersen was co-awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Crown ethers are named using the formula x-crown-y, where x is the total number of atoms in the ring and y is the number of ether oxygen atoms. The term 'crown' refers to the crown-like shape that these ether molecules...

The fragmentation patterns observed for compounds such as carboxylic acids, esters, and amides in the mass spectra include ⍺-cleavage and McLafferty rearrangement. Fragmentation by ⍺-cleavage preferentially occurs at the carbon-carbon bond at the ⍺-position next to the carboxylic group to generate a neutral radical and a cation. Long chain compounds with hydrogen at their γ-carbon undergo McLafferty rearrangement to give a radical cation and a neutral alkene.
For example, the...

An applied magnetic field causes loosely bound π-electrons in organic molecules to circulate, producing a local or induced diamagnetic field over a large spatial volume. As the molecules tumble in solution, the field generated by π-electrons in spherical substituents results in a zero net field. However, the net field generated by π-electrons in non-spherical substituents is not zero. The effect of this induced field depends on the orientation of the molecule with respect to B0,...

In complexation reactions, metal atoms or cations interact with ligands to form donor-acceptor adducts called metal complexes. Ligands that bind through one donor site are monodentate, ligands with two donor sites are bidentate, and those with more than two donor sites are polydentate ligands. For example, ethylene diamine is a bidentate ligand that binds through two nitrogen donor atoms, forming a five-membered ring. EDTA is a polydentate ligand that binds through four oxygen and two nitrogen...

When proton-coupled carbon-13 spectra are simplified by a broadband proton decoupling technique, structural information about the coupled protons is lost. Distortionless enhancement by polarization transfer (DEPT) is a technique that provides information on the number of hydrogens attached to each carbon in a molecule. While the DEPT experiment utilizes complex pulse sequences, the pulse delay and flip angle are specifically manipulated. The resulting signals have different phases depending on...