Tautomeric Equilibria Studies by Mass Spectrometry

Tautomerism in organic chemistry has been extensively studied in condensed phase by spectrometric methods, mainly by IR and NMR techniques. Mass spectrometry studies start 40 years ago but just recently it has been recognized the importance of the mass spectral data for the study of tautomerism in the gas phase. Mass spectrometry can provide valuable information in regard to tautomeric equilibria when studying mass spectra among the members of different families of organic compounds. The relevance of the mass spectral data resides on several facts but there are two that are of key importance: Mass spectral fragmentation assignments should be tautomer specific since the corresponding abundances ratios are supposed to be correlated to the keto/enol contents. Ionization in the ion source it is supposed to have no effect on the position of the equilibrium so that the results reflect the tautomers content in the gas phase previous to ionization. Some of the carbonylic compounds do not exhibit noticeable tautomerism so the fragment abundances assigned to the enol form is very low or not measurable. Since enolization is more noticeable in the case of thio-derivatives (which correlates adequately with the oxygenated analogues), the study of their mass spectra is an interesting choice to reach some degree of generalization. In addition, experimental findings are supported by semiempirical theoretical calculations, which probed to be adequate not only for supporting tendency correlations among the members of a compound family but also to calculate heats of tautomerization in gas phase. Reports using mass spectrometry for tautomerism are becoming less common. One of the reasons is that now it would appear that the interpretation of MS results is not as straightforward as it was once believed, even though in a recent review it was written that: “Mass spectrometry is the most informative and practical method for studying and identifying tautomers in the gas phase” [1]. In fact, mass spectrometry seems to be very informative for studying and identifying tautomers, because in this case external factors like solvents, intermolecular interactions, etc., can be excluded by transferring the tautomeric system into gas phase, where the process becomes truly unimolecular [1]. This review covers the study of Tautomerism by Mass Spectrometry in the last four decades.