Analytical Instrumentation for Sensitive Detection and Spectral Reproducibility

3 ANALYTICAL INSTRUMENTATION FOR SENSITIVE DETECTION AND SPECTRAL REPRODUCIBILITY 

Metastable atom bombardment (MAB) is a novel ionization method for mass spectrometry invented by Michel Bertrand s group at the University of Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and described by Faubert et al.38 For the identification of bacteria by MS, MAB has a number of significant advantages relative to more familiar ionization techniques. Electron ionization (El) imparts so much excess energy that labile biomolecules break into very small fragments, from which the diagnostic information content is limited since all 

TABLE 5.1 Excitation Energy of Metastable Species and Internal Energy of a Typical M+ 

With all the features that increase analytical sensitivity, it is possible to obtain very good quality pyrolysis Ar MAB mass spectra from 50,000 cells 

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