This award is made as the starter grant increment of Dr. Schey's Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Chemistry Award in support of his research at the Medical University of South Carolina. The thrust of Dr. Schey's research is the development and construction of a versatile time-of-flight mass spectrometer and its application to the analysis of very large molecules of biological interest. A versatile, tandem time-of-flight mass spectrometer will be constructed which is ideally suited to produce structural information on very large molecules. Ionization by matrix- assisted infrared laser desorption and broadband emission from a point source flashlamp will be investigated to improve ionization efficiency for biomolecules. Photodissociation by both CO2 laser and flashlamp emission will be explored as a means to characterize the structure of large biomolecules. The ability of surface induced dissociation to generate structurally important fragmentation will be evaluated.
