Electron Capture Dissociation in a tiny Penning Trap coupled with a Linear Radio-Frequency-Quadrupole Ion Trap – Time-of-Flight Mass Spectrometer

Introduction: We report a theoretical study of Electron Capture Dissociation (or ECD) in a Penning trap and a novel bench top instrument for ECD. ECD is recognized as a useful technique for peptide/protein analysis because it provides adiabatically cleaved fragment information (C and Z fragments) that are difficult to obtain by widely used methods such as Collision Induced Dissociation and Infra-Red Multi-Photon Dissociation. ECD has been performed in a Fourier Transform-Ion Cyclotron Mass Spectrometer (or FT-ICR). It is, however, not widely used because the instruments are expensive and large compared to ion trap mass spectrometers and TOF mass spectrometers widely used. In this paper we propose a novel alternative for ECD.