Method to reduce chemical background interference in atmospheric pressure ionization liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry using exclusive reactions with the chemical reagent dimethyl disulfide

The interference of chemical background ions (chemical noise) has been a problem since the inception of mass spectrometry. We present here a novel method to reduce the chemical noise in LC-MS based on exclusive gas-phase reactions with a reactive collision gas in a triple-quadrupole mass spectrometer. Combined with the zero neutral loss (ZNL) scan of a triple-quadrupole mass spectrometer, the reactive chemical noise ions can be removed because of shifts of mass-to-charge ratios from the original background ions. The test on various classes of compounds with different functional groups indicates a generic application of this technique in LC-MS. The preliminary results show that a reduction of the level of LC-MS base-peak chromatographic baseline by a factor up to 40 and an improvement of the signal-to-noise ratio by a factor up to 5-10 are achieved on both commercial and custom-modified triple-quadrupole LC-MS systems. Application is foreseen in both quantitative and qualitative trace analysis. It is expected that this chemical noise reduction technique can be optimized on a dedicated mass spectrometric instrumentation which incorporates both a chemical reaction cell for noise reduction and a collision stage for fragmentation.