Field Asymmetric Ion Mobility (ultraFAIMS) - Mass Spectrometry
Field Asymmetric Ion Mobility Spectrometer (ultraFAIMS) is a high speed, gas phase ion separation technique. When interfaced to a Mass Spectrometer, the FAIMS chip provides an additional separation stage, making it suitable for a applications ranging from drug development to proteomics.
The ultraFAIMS ion filter is orthogonal to both LC and MS, so has the potential to separate analytes that are difficult to distinguish using only LC-MS. In some cases, the ultraFAIMS stage can replace the LC and associated sample preparation steps. Download the ultraFAIMS whitepaper
Owlstone ultraFAIMS advantages
- Extremely fast - full FAIMS separation sweeps can be carried out in less than 1 second, allowing real-time LC-FAIMS-MS analysis
- Very high separation fields - FAIMS separation fields more than twice as high as in other FAIMS-MS devices
- Small device size- a footprint smaller than an US quarter makes integration between the ESI source and MS inlet much more straightforward
Applications
ultraFAIMS-MS is a relatively new technique and applications are continually being developed. The following are example of the capabilities:
- Reduction of chemical background noise
- Separation of equal m/z analytes (improving accurate mass measurement)
- Separation of protein and peptide charge states
- Identification of low abundance analytes in a noisy background
- Separation of conformers & isomers
- Filtering of complex samples
