Tiny ‘tornado’ boosts performance of electrospray ionization mass spectrometry

Adding the equivalent of a miniature tornado to the interface between electrospray ionization (ESI) and a mass spectrometer (MS) has allowed researchers to improve the sensitivity and detection capability of the widely-used ESI-MS analytical technique. Among the scientific fields that could benefit from the new technique are proteomics, metabolomics and lipidomics – which serve biomedical and health applications ranging from biomarker detection and diagnostics to drug discovery and molecular medicine.