Mass Spectrometry in India

Abstract

All rights reserved EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF MASS SPECTROMETRY This review highlights the research in mass spectrometry carried out all over India, with a focus on the last two decades. There has been a phenomenal increase in the use of mass spectrometers in India during the last decade following the introduction, at the beginning of the 21st century, of rugged electrospray ionization sources for the commercially available instruments, with applications such as pharmacokinetics and bio-equivalence drug studies, pesticide residue analysis and proteomics. There have been more papers published in these areas than could be fully covered in this article. This review covers mostly research in mass spectrometry carried out continuously in institutions where advanced facilities for mass spectrometry are functional. Researchers in India, with some notable exceptions, have always used and still use commercial mass spectrometers in their various areas of research, rather than develop their unique instruments. The review is divided into three parts: organic, elemental (or atomic) and biological mass spectrometry. Organic mass spectrometry Organic and bio-organic chemistry Research in organic mass spectrometry in the early years was mainly focused on the study of mass spectral fragmentation of different classes of new compounds,and was initiated in the 1960s by the late Das and his colleagues from the National Chemical Laboratory (NCL), Pune. The first double-focusing mass spectrometer (CEC-110 B) was installed at NCL for high-resolution mass measurements. The compounds studied by Das and his colleagues included aromatic amides, Benzophenanthridine derivatives, norses

John Herbert Beynon. 29 December 1923—24 August 2015

“…By this time, John had built a close relationship with the creative scientists and engineers working at Metropolitan Vickers, and developed lifelong relationships with them. They investigated the known designs for double-focusing instruments (Bateman 2012) and approached John with their recommendation of a Nier–Johnson design for his ICI-funded project. John liked this design because, of all the then-known double-focusing geometries, this was the one with the shortest ion path, an advantage because it implied fewer peak-broadening ion collisions with background gas molecules.…”