Improvement of Ionization Efficiency and Application of Structural Analysis for MALDI-TOFMS by Derivatization of Polyacrylic Acid.

Matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOFMS) is a suitable method for polymer analysis. MALDI is a soft ionization technique that can generate mainly singly charged ions. Therefore, the polymer's molecular weight distribution is easy to analyze, facilitating the calculation of the number average molecular weight and weight average molecular weight and polydispersity. However, there are polymers that are difficult to detect by MALDI-TOFMS. For example, polyacrylic acid includes carboxylic acid in the main chain, which is difficult to measure due to its low ionization efficiency. As a solution, the ionization efficiency was improved by methylation. In this technical report, we introduce a method to utilize derivatization to determine the degree of polymerization by accurate mass spectrometry (MS). Furthermore, the structures of both ends of the polymers were estimated by tandem time-of-flight MS.