animation — screenshots

Mass spectrometry : triple quadrupole (MS/MS) animation, Selected Reaction Monitoring

For the PhD defense of Luc Alexis Leuthold in chemistry (Feb. 2007), at the University of Geneva, an MS/MS animation was made of the widely used Selected Reaction Monitoring (SRM) function of triple quadrupole mass spectrometers, as a didactic tool to explain SRM in a few minutes to a general public. The animation shows (for the letters, please refer to the screenshots) :

— (A) ions of 3 different masses (i.e. colors) at the start in the first quadrupole,
— (B) one ion of a selected mass (i.e. blue color) beeing filtered in Q1,
— (C) entering the collision cell and
— (D) fragmented in q2 into 3 different fragments (with different masses, i.e. shapes), one of these fragments being filtered in Q3.
— (E) this selected fragment in Q3 hits the detector, produces a signal (i.e. flash).

Two views of the same animation were made : an outside and an inside view. Here above are the low resolution demos of these 10 seconds animations in Quicktime (.mov) format, allowing slow motion, stop and play. We might produce similar animations for other MS scan functions, as Product Ion Scan (PIS), some RF-only, and even Q TRAP functions as Enhanced Product Ion (EPI) or MS/MS/MS (M3).

Please or contact us for informations or if you are interested in this stuff.
To the best of our knowledge in January 2007, nothing similar (MS/MS, didactic and not from vendors) could be found on the web. So we made it with an old friend.