ABSTRACT
Recent advances in liquid sample introduction in mass spectrometry have resulted in tremendous growth of high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC)-mass spectrometry (MS). The two major areas of incompatibility between HPLC and MS are solvent loading and the use of in volatile buffer salts. The regular-bore liquid chromatography flow rate is typically 1 mL/min, which translates to approximately 1 L/min of vapor after evaporation. The recent success of coupling high performance liquid chromatography to inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry and electrospray mass spectrometry is due largely to solving of the incompatibility problem. High performance liquid chromatography-inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (HPLC-ICP-MS) and high performance liquid chromatography-electrospray mass spectrometry (HPLC-ESMS) lend themselves readily to trace metal speciation. Inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry is a relatively new technique for elemental and isotopic analysis which combines the power of the inductively coupled argon plasma as an atomization and ionization source with the sensitivity and selectivity of mass spectrometry.
