The combination of electrochemistry (EC) and mass spectrometry (MS) is a powerful analytical tool to study redox reactions. This work reports the online coupling of a thin-layer electrochemical flow cell with liquid sample desorption electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (DESI-MS) and its applications in investigating various electrochemical reactions of biological molecules such as oxidative formation and reductive cleavage of disulfide bonds and online derivatization of peptides/proteins. As a result of the direct sampling nature of DESI, several useful features of such a coupling have been found, including simple instrumentation, fast response time (e.g., 3.6 s in the case of dopamine oxidation), freedom to choose a favorable ionization mode of DESI or traditional electrolysis solvent systems, and the absence of background signal possibly resulting from ionization when the cell is off (e.g., in the case of dopamine oxidation). More importantly, with the use of this new coupling apparatus, three disulfide bonds of insulin were fully cleaved by electrolytic reduction and both the A and B chains of the protein were successfully detected online by DESI-MS. In addition, online tagging of free cysteine residues of peptides/proteins employing electrogenerated dopamine o-quinone can be performed. These revealed characteristics of the coupling along with examined electrochemical reactions suggest that EC/DESI-MS has good potential in bioanalysis.

The disulfide bond bridge is an important post-translational modification for proteins. This study presents a structural analysis of biologically active peptides and proteins containing disulfide bonds using electrochemistry (EC) online combined with desorption electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (DESI-MS), in which the sample undergoes electrolytic disulfide cleavage in an electrochemical flow cell followed by MS detection. Using this EC/DESI-MS method, the disulfide-containing peptides can be quickly identified from enzymatic digestion mixtures, simply based on the abrupt decrease in their relative ion abundances after electrolysis. Peptide mass mapping and tandem MS analysis of the ions of the resulting free peptide chains can possibly establish the disulfide linkage pattern and sequence the precursor peptides. In this regard, the method provides much more chemical information than previous analogous electrochemical analyses. In addition, derivatization of thiols by selective selenamide reagents is useful for easy recognition of reduced peptide ions and the number of their free thiols. Furthermore, electrolytic reduction of proteins (e.g., α-lactalbumin) leads to increased charges on the detected protein ions, revealing the role of disulfide bonds on maintaining protein conformation. This electrochemical mass spectrometric method is fast (completed in few minutes) and does not need chemical reductants, potentially having valuable applications in proteomics research.

A liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (LC/MS) method using desorption electrospray ionization (DESI) as a versatile interface has been established, which allows a wide range of elution flow rates, online derivatization via reactive DESI and further combination with electrochemistry.

The electrochemical stability of copper substrate was studied in three different lithium-ion battery electrolytes. Cyclic voltammetry was used to study the oxidation-reduction behavior of copper in these electrolyte solutions. The reduction of electrolyte and its effect on the oxidation of copper was also studied. Bulk electrolysis was used to quantitatively study the dissolution of copper in dry electrolytes and in electrolytes doped with impurities of H 2 O or HF. The stability of copper was closely related to the composition of the electrolytes. Impurities dramatically increased the oxidation tendency of copper.

Covalent disulfide bond linkage in a protein represents an important challenge for mass spectrometry (MS)-based top-down protein structure analysis as it reduces the backbone cleavage efficiency for MS/MS dissociation. This study presents a strategy for solving this critical issue via integrating electrochemistry (EC) online with top-down MS approach. In this approach, proteins undergo electrolytic reduction in an electrochemical cell to break disulfide bonds and then online ionized into gaseous ions for analysis by electron-capture dissociation (ECD) and collision-induced dissociation (CID). The electrochemical reduction of proteins allows to remove disulfide bond constraints and also leads to increased charge numbers of the resulting protein ions. As a result, sequence coverage was significantly enhanced, as exemplified by β-lactoglobulin A (24 vs. 73 backbone cleavages before and after electrolytic reduction, respectively) and lysozyme (5 vs. 66 backbone cleavages before and after electrolytic reduction, respectively). This methodology is fast and does not need chemical reductants, which would have an important impact in high-throughput proteomics research.