Uses of Plasmaspray and Electrospray

In the latter, small quantities of emerging mixture components dissolved in elution solvent would be laborious to deal with if each component were to be first isolated by evaporation of solvent before its introduction into the mass spectrometer. In such circumstances, the direct introduction, removal of solvent, and ionization provided by plasmaspray or electrospray is a boon and puts LC/MS on a par with GC/MS for mixture analysis. Furthermore, GC is normally concerned with volatile, low-molecular-weight compounds and is of little or no use for the many polar, water- soluble, high-molecular-mass substances such as the peptides, proteins, carbohydrates, nucleotides, 

By rapidly vaporizing a solution by heat, a spray is produced from which the solvent can be removed, leaving sample ions that pass straight into the analyzer region of a mass spectrometer. Plasmaspray is very similar, but ion yield is vastly improved through use of a corona discharge. 

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