Development of a capillary high-performance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry system using SWIFT...

In this work a capillary high-performance liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry system has been developed in a quadrupole ion trap/reflectron time-of-flight mass spectrometer. The broadband excitation for isolating a precursor ion is achieved by generating the stored waveform inverse Fourier transform waveform in real time. Following the isolation and cooling periods, an auxiliary AC voltage (tickle) is applied to the entrance end cap of the ion trap to generate collision induced dissociation. The amplitude of the tickle voltage is optimized on-line using a feedback method which involves having two computers communicating with each other. This system has been tested with a 4-peptide mixture and tandem mass spectra were obtained for each peptide.