Concentric Hybrid Nanoelectrospray Ionization-Atmospheric Pressure Chemical Ionization Source for High-Coverage Mass
Tianrun Xu1, Hang Li1, Peng Dou1
1CAS Key Laboratory of Separation Science for Analytical Chemistry, Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Liaoning Province Key Laboratory of Metabolomics, Dalian, Liaoning, 116023, P. R. China.
None:
High-coverage mass spectrometry analysis of single-cell metabolomics remains challenging due to the extremely low abundance and wide polarity of metabolites and ultra-small volume in single cells. Herein, a novel concentric hybrid ionization source, nanoelectrospray ionization-atmospheric pressure chemical ionization (nanoESI-APCI), is ingeniously designed to detect polar and nonpolar metabolites simultaneously in single cells. The source is constructed by inserting a pulled glass capillary coaxially into a glass tube that acts as a dielectric barrier layer. Benefitting from the integrated advantages of nanoESI and APCI, its limit of detection is improved by one order of magnitude to 10 pg mL-1. After the operational parameter optimization, 254 metabolites detected in nanoESI-APCI are tentatively identified from a single cell, and 82 more than those in nanoESI. The developed nanoESI-APCI is successively applied to study the metabolic heterogeneity of human hepatocellular carcinoma tissue microenvironment united with laser capture microdissection (LCM), the discrimination of cancer cell types and subtypes, the metabolic perturbations to glucose starvation in MCF7 cells and the metabolic regulation of cancer stem cells. These results demonstrated that the nanoESI-APCI not only opens a new avenue for high-coverage and high-sensitivity metabolomics analysis of single cell, but also facilitates spatially resolved metabolomics study coupled with LCM.
More Related Videos
Related Concept Videos
Electrospray Ionization (ESI) Mass Spectrometry
ESI utilizes electrical energy to transfer ions from the liquid phase of the sample into the...
Mass Spectrometry: Complex Analysis
GC–MS is a powerful hyphenated method commonly used in forensics and environmental...
Inductively Coupled Plasma–Mass Spectrometry (ICP–MS): Overview
Tandem Mass Spectrometry
Secondary fragmentations occur in the interaction cell and can be induced by various factors. Fragmentation induced by collision with inert gases, such as N2, Ar, He, etc., is called collision-induced...
Peptide Identification Using Tandem Mass Spectrometry
This technique helps gather information regarding the protein from which the peptide was obtained and to study the peptides’ amino acid sequence. Identifying peptides from a complex mixture is an important component of the growing field of...
High-Resolution Mass Spectrometry (HRMS)


