Assembly of proteins, drug interactions, and substrate recognition are a few of the vital physiological interactions that depend on the chiral orientation of molecules. Preliminary results clearly demonstrate that by modifying the drift gas with chiral molecules, ion mobility spectrometry can provide a novel and rapid separation technique for chiral compounds. Similar to chiral chromatography and capillary electrophoresis, the ability of chiral ion mobility spectrometry to examine enantiomeric mixtures is based upon the interaction of analytes with neutral chiral modifiers. The ultimate goal of the research proposed is to develop and commercialize the rapid chiral separation and characterization instrument: electrospray ionization - chiral ion mobility spectrometer - mass spectrometer (ESI-CIMS-MS). The proposed system can not only separate chiral molecules in milliseconds, but also reduce method development time to minutes. Great separation speed and easy method development of ESI-CIMS-MS make it the method of choice for many applications analysis time is a critical consideration. The proposed system can be used to directly measure enantiomeric excess of chiral ingredients in pharmaceutical products, may serve to increase throughput for chirality measurements in drug discovery when hundreds of drug compounds are being screened as drug candidates, can be used to monitor the performance of preparative chiral separation processes, or can be used as a chiral selective detector for chromatographic systems. Key words: chiral Ion mobility spectrometer, electrospray ionization, enantiomers, pharmaceuticls, rapid chiral separation
Proposed chiral ion mobility spectrometer - mass spectrometer, separating and identifying chiral compounds in seconds, can potentially replace chiral chromatography for chiral analysis time is a critical consideration. Rapid enantiomeric excess measurement is essential in drug discovery process and QA/QC of pharmaceutical products as worldwide sales of single-enantiomer compounds made into the pharmaceutical formulations reaches $150 billion/year. The proposed system can also be used for the analysis of chiral compounds in complex mixture for quantification and detection of biomarkers, metabolites and other bioactive compounds in biomedical research.
