| TECHNOLOGY |
FT-ICR MS can distinguish between ions that differ in mass by less than the mass of an electron. Therefore, it can be used to separate compounds that have the same nominal mass. So far, authors have been able to resolve more than 11,000 compounds using positive-ion mass spectrometry and more than 6,000 compounds using negative-ion mass spectrometry. They can resolve even more compounds, including low-abundance species, by only looking at ions within a certain mass-to-charge ratio segment. They then combine the segments to stitch together the complete mass spectrum. By summing the segments, they can double the number of compounds they can identify.
One application of FT-ICR MS is differentiating crude oil samples from different parts of the world. Authors compared North American and Chinese crude oil. The North American crude oil was dirtier and was dominated by nitrogen-containing compounds. In contrast, the cleaner Chinese oil was dominated by oxygen-containing compounds. The next step, authors , is for the petroleum industry to start using the information that’s being gathered. “We can get the information that they didn’t have before. Now what they do with it will depend on them, because they’re the ones that know the other half, like which batches cause corrosion
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