Tandem Mass Spectrometry
Chris Richter
In MFA usually data from single quad mass spectrometry is used for flux computation. The in-source fragmentation (electron impact = EI) in the mass spectrometer results in typical fragments of the analytes that represent different parts of the molecule. With this information, we can reconstruct the path through metabolism that the carbon atoms have taken. However, single-MS usually gives insufficient fragmentation to determine the percentage of label in each individual carbon atom of an analyte. EI-Fragments can be further broken down and filtered by tandem-MS. We are in the process of identifying and quantifying these precursor-product ion pairs and using this data for steady-state MFA. First results show that the calculated fluxes are of higher resolution than with single-MS data only.
