Nanoscale packed-capillary liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry using a coaxial continuous-flow fast atom bombardment interface.

Nanoscale packed-capillary liquid chromatography (LC) columns have been coupled with mass spectrometry (MS) using a coaxial continuous-flow fast atom bombardment interface. The combined system has been applied to the analysis of mixtures of peptides, including synthetic mixtures of bioactive peptides and tryptic digests of proteins. Nanoscale packed-capillary columns offer two principal advantages for LC/MS analysis--high chromatographic separation efficiencies and low mobile-phase flow rates. The high separation efficiencies facilitate the separation of complex mixtures, and the low mobile-phase flow rates reduce problems with coupling the LC effluent with the high-vacuum, high-voltage environment of sector MS ion sources. The columns used in this work were 50- or 75-micron i.d., 1-2 m long, packed with 10-micron C18 particles, using mobile-phase flow rates of 50-350 nL/min.