ACQUISITION OF A ROUTINE MASS SPECTROMETER

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This is a joint proposal from ten PI's (eight with current and/or pending NIH support) engaged in various facets of chemical synthesis involving organic, organometallic, and biological compounds. Nine of the faculty are in the Boston College Chemistry Department: one is in the Biology Department. The proposal is for the purchase of a routine, high-throughput, mass spectrometer (MS) that can help graduate students and postdoctoral associates to carry out everyday tasks of characterizing reaction products and monitoring reaction outcomes. At present the only mass spectrometer anywhere at Boston College is a GC/MS that is limited to samples with a molecular weight under 500 amu that are volatile enough to go through a gas chromatography (GC) column and that can be detected by electron impact (EI) techniques. The GC/MS is thus useless for most of the samples generated at the University. The proposed instrument is a Micromass Platform II Mass Spectrometer System equipped with both an HPLC/MS interface and a direct insertion probe, with electrospray/atmospheric pressure ionization (ES/API), fast atom bombardment (FAB), electron impact (EI), and chemical ionization (CI) capabilities with a mass range of 2-4500 Da/e. The proposed instrument will address the vast majority of our needs. The variety of ionization capabilities will satisfy the various requirements of a diverse user group without being redundant. The instrument is flexible enough to handle many kinds of samples and sufficiently durable and user-friendly to be a high-capacity workhorse with minimal down time. Moreover, although the requested MS is classified as a "low resolution" instrument, it will be configured to obtain exact mass measurement that satisfy journal high resolution (HRMS) publication criteria. Access to the requested instrument will increase productivity and give students and postdoctoral fellows hands-on exposure to one of the most valuable analytical techniques available.