R. Graham Cooks
Henry B. Hass Distinguished Professor–Analytical Chemistry
Department of Chemistry
Purdue University
Title:Ambient Ionization and Mini Mass Spectrometers: In situ MS for EveryoneRead Abstract
Date: Sunday, March 11, 2012
Time: 4:30 p.m.
Location: Chapin Theater, Orange County Convention Center
(Complimentary mixer immediately following Plenary Lecture.)
In a decade, personal mass spectrometers will be in wide use. They will serve as general purpose instruments, connected to personal digital devices, and be used to monitor a wide variety of chemicals and biologicals in the home, public spaces and work places. They will be used by individuals to aid in long-term health monitoring and maintenance, as a last-line of defense in foods and consumer products monitoring, and in securing a legal basis for limiting exposure to toxic chemicals whether emanating from the neighborhood, the workplace or commercial products. They will be capable of quantitative measurements of particular compounds and be able to automatically identify compounds in complex mixtures in a point-and-shoot fashion.
All the essential requirements to achieve this are in place. The keys to this technology are (i) ambient ionization, viz. ionization in the open environment without sample preparation (ii) tandem mass spectrometry to allow identification of particular compounds in the ionized mixture and (iii) automated library searching to identify the compounds of interest. All three have been in wide use for a number of years and the last decade has seen the design and characterization of a number of small portable mass spectrometers. Another symposium in this conference [Miniature Mass Spectrometers: Reaching for the Exponential on the Growth Curve] provides details on some of these instruments, both commercial and otherwise.
Some of the remaining technological issues involve system optimization, including improvements in small vacuum systems. Ion traps are the mass analyzers of choice for miniaturization but improvement in resolution in small scale instruments still needs work. The greatest area in which effort is needed is in quantitation, where recent data using paper spray ionization are encouraging in showing that internal standards can be used for trace analyte quantitation at FDA mandated precision and accuracy levels without being intimately mixed with the sample prior to the experiment. This is the case even for very complex samples like whole biofluids.
It seems likely that it will take some societal scare related to personal safety to catalyze the widespread utilization of measurement capabilities by members of the public. Putting measurement tools in the hands of individuals will contribute to social justice. The educational effect of widespread available of measurement science tools will be another positive development. The talk explores these themes, mostly through discussion of the technological issues.
Graham Cooks received Ph.D. degrees from the University of Natal (now QuaZulu-Natal) and Cambridge University. His interests involve construction of mass spectrometers and their use in fundamental studies and applications. Early in his career, he worked on energy partitioning during metastable ion fragmentation and contributed to the concept and implementation of tandem mass spectrometry and to desorption ionization, especially matrix-based methods. His interest in minimizing sample work-up and avoiding chromatography contributed to the development of the ambient ionization methods, including desorption electrospray ionization (DESI).
Applications of this method in tissue imaging, forensics and pharmaceutics are in progress. These same interests also led to the construction of miniature ion trap mass spectrometers and their application to problems of trace chemical detection. His interests in the fundamentals of ion chemistry include chiral analysis and spontaneous chiral resolution in clusters and the possible role of the amino acid serine in the biochemical origins of life.
Graham Cooks is a past President of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry and the International Mass Spectrometry Society and a Life Member of the British Mass Spectrometry Society. He has had the pleasure of working with several hundred collaborators from around the world including a hundred Ph. D. students.
R. Graham Cooks
