An overview of liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry

This thesis reviews the LC-MS techniques with particular attention to their applications in the analysis of amino acids and peptides. Although the development of the on-line LC-MS was inspired by the success of GC-MS, particularly in the field of biological sciences due to the wider applicability of LC, LC and MS are basically incompatible. In order to overcome the incompatibility in the conjunction of LC with MS, many successful interfaces have been designed including MBI, DLI, CF-FAB, TSP and ESP, especially CF-FAB, TSP and ESP which introduce soft ionization and therefore, LC-MS techniques have become accessible to large biomolecules. The application of LC-MS has been successful for the determination of molecular weight and sequence of peptides.