Resolution of Isomeric Mixtures in Ion Mobility Using a Combined Demultiplexing and Peak Deconvolution Technique

A combined data acquisition and data processing strategy for improving the sensitivity and resolution of ion mobility measurements is described. This strategy is implemented on a commercially available drift tube ion mobility-mass spectrometry (IM-MS) instrument and utilizes both an existing ion multiplexing strategy to achieve up to an 8-fold gain in ion signal and a new postacquisition data reconstruction technique, termed "high resolution demultiplexing" (HRdm), to improve resolution in the ion mobility dimension. A series of isomeric mixtures were qualitatively investigated with HRdm, including biologically relevant lipids and carbohydrates, which were successfully resolved by HRdm, including two monosaccharide regioisomers which differed in drift time by only 0.8%. For a complex trisaccharide isomer mixture, HRdm was able to resolve 5 out of 6 components. An analysis of two-peak resolution (R_pp) and peak-to-peak separation (ΔP) indicated that HRdm performs with an effective resolving power (R_p) of between 180 to 250 for the highest deconvolution settings. Overall analysis times and drift time measurement precision were found to be unaffected between standard and HRdm processed data sets, which allowed statistically identical collision cross section values to be directly determined from all ion mobility spectra.