Mass Spectrometry History
Mass Spectrometry History
Last Updated on Friday, 2 July 2010 08:41 Written by Administrator Sunday, 27 June 2010 08:55
In 1886, Eugen Goldstein observed rays in gas discharges under low pressure that traveled away from the anode and through channels in a perforated cathode, opposite to the direction of negatively charged cathode rays (which travel from cathode to anode). Goldstein called these positively charged anode rays “Kanalstrahlen”; the standard translation of this term into English is “canal rays”. Wilhelm Wien found that strong electric or magnetic fields deflected the canal rays and, in 1899, constructed a device with parallel electric and magnetic fields that separated the positive rays according to their charge-to-mass ratio (Q/m). Wien found that the charge-to-mass ratio depended on the nature of the gas in the discharge tube. English scientist J.J. Thomson later improved on the work of Wien by reducing the pressure to create a mass spectrograph.
The first application of mass spectrometry to the analysis of amino acids and peptides was reported in 1958.[11] Carl-Ove Andersson highlighted the main fragment ions observed in the ionization of methyl esters.[12]
Some of the modern techniques of mass spectrometry were devised by Arthur Jeffrey Dempster and F.W. Aston in 1918 and 1919 respectively. In 1989, half of the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Hans Dehmelt and Wolfgang Paul for the development of the ion trap technique in the 1950s and 1960s. In 2002, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to John Bennett Fenn for the development of electrospray ionization (ESI) and Koichi Tanaka for the development of soft laser desorption (SLD) and their application to the ionization of biological macromolecules, especially proteins.[13] The earlier development of matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization (MALDI) by Franz Hillenkamp and Michael Karas has not been so recognized despite the comparable (arguably greater) practical impact of this technique, particularly in the field of protein analysis.[14] This is due to the fact that although MALDI was first reported in 1985,[15] it was not applied to the ionization of proteins until 1988,[16] after Tanaka’s report.[17]
