SBIR-STTR Award

The long-term goal of this project is to develop miniaturized electrospray (or nanospray) emitters that have enhanced durability versus those which are currently available. While nanospray mass spectrometry has improved detection limits, requires less sample volume, and much lower flow rates (resulting in much reduced consumption of analyte), current emitters using gold coatings are highly suspectible to destruction by electrical discharge. Here, we pursue conductive polymer coatings which exhibit high resistance to electrical discharge as alternative coatings for nanospray mass spectrometry. The development of such durable emitters will permit the stable coupling of capillary separations techniques directly to nanospray mass spectrometry for high sensitive detection and characterization of biological molecules directly from complex mixtures of biomolecules in biological fluids (e.g., cerebrospinal fluid, blood plasma, tear fluid, etc.). Such a powerful combination of analytical technologies will have important implications in detecting biomolecules which are indicative of disease states (for example protein isoforms of hemoglobin or prealbumin) as well as providing information on in vivo drug pharmacokinetics by measuring pharmaceutical products to extremely low levels directly from biological fluids (e.g. metabolism of anti-cancer drugs and their metabolic products directly from blood plasma). PROPOSED COMMERCIAL APPLICATION: The development of conductive polymer coated nanospray emitters will provide for the first time a durable nanospray emitter capable of functioning throughout the course of a capillary separations technique coupled directly to nanospray. Thus, analysis of subpicomole levels of biological molecules directly from biological fluids will be possible, with application to biomedicine and pharmaceutical science.

The long-term goal of this project is to develop miniaturized electrospray ionization (or nanospray) emitters that have enhanced durability and sensitivity versus those currently available. Nanospray mass spectrometry has improved detection limits, requires less sample volume, and uses lower flow rates (resulting in reduced consumption of analyte) than conventional electrospray ionization. However, commercial nanospray emitters which use thin gold films are readily destroyed by electrical discharge. An alternative to gold coatings for nanospray emitters employing conductive polyaniline has been developed at the University at Buffalo (UB). Polyaniline coatings exhibit high resistance to destruction by electrical discharge and retain the sensitivity improvements of nanospray over electrospray. The demonstrated superior durability of polyaniline-coated emitters to current commercial emitters should permit, for the first-time, routine coupling of capillary separations techniques to nanospray. The advantage of such a coupling is that it would permit highly sensitive detection and characterization of biological molecules and drugs directly from complex biological mixtures (e.g., cerebrospinal fluid, blood plasma, etc.). This powerful combination of analytical technologies will have important implications in detection of protein molecules indicative of disease states (e.g., hemoglobin, prealbumin). The immediate objective here is to demonstrate operational capillary electrophoresis and capillary liquid chromatography coupled to nanospray MS using polyaniline-coated emitters, and to produce commercially an integrated capillary column-nanospray emitter unit.

Thesaurus Terms:
biomedical equipment development, electrospray ionization mass spectrometry, miniature biomedical equipment analytical chemistry, aniline, capillary electrophoresis, liquid chromatography, nanotechnology, polymer, surface coating