Ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography charge transfer dissociation mass spectrometry (UHPLC-CTD-MS) as a tool for analyzing the structural heterogeneity in carrageenan oligosaccharides
Résumé
Ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography (UHPLC) with charge transfer dissociation mass spectrometry (CTD-MS) is
presented for the analysis of a mixture of complex sulfated oligosaccharides. The mixture contained kappa (κ), iota (ι), and
lambda (λ) carrageenans that contain anhydro bridges, different degrees of sulfation ranging from one to three per dimer,
different positioning of the sulfate groups along the backbone, and varying degrees of polymerization (DP) between 4 and 12.
Optimization studies using standard mixtures of carrageenans helped establish the optimal conditions for online UHPLC-CTDMS/MS analysis. Optimization included (1) UHPLC conditions; (2) ion source conditions, such as the capillary voltage, drying
gas and nebulizing gas temperature, and flow rate; and (3) CTD-MS conditions, including data-dependent CTD-MS. The
UHPLC-CTD results were contrasted with UHPLC-CID results of the same mixture on the same instrument. Whereas CID
tends to produce B/Y and C/Z ions with many neutral losses, CTD produced more abundant A/X ions and less abundant neutral
losses, which enabled more confident structural detail. The results demonstrate that He-CTD is compatible with the timescale of
UHPLC and provides more structural information about carrageenans compared to state-of-the-art methods like UHPLC-CID
analysis