Chromatography Forum

Hello all,
Im starting my research for my masters and im doing chemical profiling of a mushroom with GC-MS. Honestly i have little know knowledge of MS...but i want to learn!....what books or topics should i read?....so that i understand fragmentation and interpretation?? My chemistry is very poor so please be specific in what to read on!....
Thanks very much for your help in advance

The great, old classic on my desk is McLafferty and Tureck. And it is great up to about chapter 6 - then it gets hard. David Sparkman has an introduction to mass spec that looks like it should be good.

The next question is how you are going to be using the MS. If you will be looking for known compounds in the mushroom, you can use libraries to tentatively ID compunds and reference materials to verify ID's. But you need to know good technique for operating the instrument - and soem of that you have to lear from a good GC/MS person. (Some of that never seems to make it into books.) If you are looking at unknown compunds you need to understand the chemistry that goes on in fragmentation of molecules - and need to know organic chemistry.

And, read as much as you can about mushrooms and their composition. The more you know about what is likely to be in your sample, the faster you can make your way through the compounds that could be expected.

Would I be right to guess that your background is not in chemistry, more on the biological side ? If so, welcome to the club. From experience, my advice is to find good analytical chemists who can help you - modern instruments are seductively simple to operate and deceptively good at generating what looks like useful data but is in fact nearly useless, but for anything except the most straightforward problems and for routine analyses by standard methods you really need to have a pretty good understanding of what is going on in order to ask the right questions and design methods to answer them.

The first step is to clearly work out what question it is about the mushrooms that you want a chemical analysis to answer, because that will determine what (kind of) compounds you need to analyse for, and that determines which techniques are most appropriate.

Peter

For a general background to the whole range of mass spectrometry I usually recommend de Hoffmann and Stroobant
http://www.tesco.com/books/browse.aspx?N=4294841732
(sorry about the tesco link. You can buy it from anywhere)
If you only want GC-MS, it may be more cost-effective to go for a more specific title. You are lucky with GC; there is a lot more GC fragmentation in a typical general chemistry book than there is LC-fragmentation.
Good luck

I think the "Handbook of GC/MS" by Hans-Joachim Hübschmann (2009) is pretty good.

But the person who helped me the most was our instrument technician (who we no longer have, unfortunately).

The great, old classic on my desk is McLafferty and Tureck. And it is great up to about chapter 6 - then it gets hard.

What edition is that? My copy is 3rd and only has McLafferty as author. I got it when I took a Mass Spec grad course in the mid 80s.

- Karen

The great, old classic on my desk is McLafferty and Tureck. And it is great up to about chapter 6 - then it gets hard.

What edition is that? My copy is 3rd and only has McLafferty as author. I got when I took a Mass Spec course grad course in the mid 80s.

- Karen

Probably 4th edition, published in 1993.

http://www.amazon.com/Interpretation-Ma ... 0935702253

For the rest of the books mentioned:

http://www.amazon.com/Handbook-GC-MS-Fu ... 107&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/Mass-Spectrometry ... 209&sr=1-1

http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Mass ... 251&sr=1-2

http://www.amazon.com/Mass-Spectrometry ... 251&sr=1-4

I acquired my copy in the 90's. And yes, I noted that Tureck was a "new name."

I would have to agree with Peter Apps. In conjunction with reading materials on GC-MS it is invaluable to have a good analytical chemist or instrument technician by your side or as a "go-to" person during your learning. Many time these people have decades of personal experience with these analytical instruments and can help you hands on in the learning process. You will learn the most from hands on guided experience that you will from reading 5-10 600 page books on GC-MS. See if there is an analytical professor in your university's chemistry department who may be willing to help out a little or just point you in the right direction.

I'd use books AND the advice of an expert: there are so many experts around who don't actually know very much (or worse: know the wrong things), that it's helpful to have some way to assess how expert the expert is.

Definition of an expert: an "ex" is a has been and a "spert" is a drip under pressure.

Peter