Talking about mass spectrometer and its development trend

Mass spectrometers have become a hot spot in the industry in recent years and have developed rapidly.

I would like to talk about some of the most promising mass spectrometry products

1.
High-end mass spectrometer

With the daily inspection needs of the environment, food, water quality, and soil, the market for mass spectrometers is expanding day by day, and it continues to develop in the direction of gentrification
.

Looking at the future trend, there are two ways to go for high-end instruments.

Mobility spectroscopy is called mass spectrometry under atmospheric pressure, and its characteristic is that it can separate ions in space or time according to their mobility (mainly reflecting the collision cross-sectional area of ​​the ions, and indirectly reflecting the size and structure of the ions)
.

Of course, there is also separation based on the difference between the mobility under high electric field and low electric field, which is called differential mobility spectroscopy or high-field asymmetric ion mobility spectroscopy

At present, most domestic mass spectrometer practitioners have very limited understanding of ion mobility spectroscopy
.

Major international mass spectrometry companies have mastered migration spectroscopy technology and put their products on the market

2.
Mini mass spectrometer

My friends have seen a large mass spectrometer, but many people have not seen the small one.
When seeing other instruments continue to have portable products coming out, many people ask this question, why can’t our mass spectrometers be made smaller?

In the past, there were not many requirements for the appearance of mass spectrometers, so such mini-mass spectrometers are rare in the market.
However, with the increasing demand in food safety, environmental pollution, public safety and other fields in recent years, many manufacturers have stepped in Research on mini (small) mass spectrometer
.

Now there are some mini products in the field of quadrupole and ion trap.
A company called 908device in the United States exhibited a handheld small ion trap mass spectrometer at the exhibition.
It is only the size of a marking machine, with a friendly interface, strong practicability, and specialization.
Designed for firefighters, it can quickly detect explosive, flammable and toxic and harmful gases at the fire scene
.

Moreover, its ion trap mass analyzer is made into a module, which is small in size, convenient to disassemble and easy to maintain

　　Of course, some mass spectrometry technologies are not suitable for making mini-mass spectrometers at this stage, such as magnetic sector mass spectrometry, Fourier transform-ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry (FT-ICRMS) and orbitrap mass spectrometry (orbitrap)
.

Therefore, one of the industry’s predictions for the future development of mass spectrometry is to develop in the direction of miniaturization.

 

Three, open mass spectrometry

 

　　Open mass spectrometry, called AmbientMassSpectrometry in English
.

It mainly uses AmbientIonizationSource in LCMS to replace the original ESI and APCI, thereby removing the part of LC, and can directly desorb and ionize unprocessed or semi-processed samples under atmospheric pressure

2.
Rapid sample screening (such as drugs, contraband, criminal investigation, public safety, etc.
);

3.
Imaging studies of the components to be tested in actual samples (such as the distribution of tumor cells in the tissues, the identification of antiques, drug targeted therapy and metabolism studies, etc.
);

4.
There are also studies on the mechanism of chemical reactions and others
.

The biggest feature of this technology is fast
.

Therefore, it is generally optimistic about the industry

 

    In the large family of instruments, the mass spectrometry industry is relatively small and still lags behind the overall development.
However, the market has expanded rapidly in recent years and has entered a period of rapid development.
I believe that with the increasing application of mass spectrometry products in various fields The wider the spectrum, the further development of mass spectrometry technology will provide greater help for our production and life
.
(Gao Yi / text)