posted on 2024-02-05, 14:34authored byJuxing Zeng, Kaiyue Sun, Shiyi Chen, Xin Zhang, Xiaofei Wang, Bo Zhang
The nanoelectrosprayer is a key device in the hyphenation
of nanoLC-ESI-MS,
and its development plays a crucial role in pushing forward the mining
depth of biological discovery and industrialization of omics science.
In this work, a new type of nanoelectrospray emitter, a rod sprayer,
was developed based on microfluidic manufacture. Due to its porous
silica structure, the rod sprayer in effect worked as a multinozzle
sprayer, which is composed of a bunch of micrometer sized spray channels.
Without the need for sophisticated microfabrication equipment, a superclean
environment, or a complicated assembling process, such sprayer rods
can be facilely fabricated in a mass production style: 3,600 rods
with excellent monodispersity have been fabricated in 1 h, and rod
sprayers thus made have demonstrated excellent intraday, interday,
and interbatch reproducibilities: RSD = 1.9, 4.9, and 6.1%, respectively.
The rod sprayer can generate stable electrospray in a wide voltage
range from 2.6 to 3.2 kV and flow rates from 50 to 1000 nL/min, covering
typical flow rates of subnanoLC, nanoLC, to microLC, and work steadily
even under complex matrix environments (e.g., Hank’s balanced
salt solution containing sodium, magnesium, and calcium ions) without
clogging. Meanwhile, the rod sprayers exhibited 200–1800% ionization
efficiency enhancement in comparison with commonly used tapered tip
emitters, for small molecule drugs, peptides, and proteins, respectively,
and provided a broadened linear dynamic range of 4 orders of magnitude.
The excellent characteristics of the rod sprayer, together with its
small size and mass production capacity, should provide a high quality,
high durability, high consistency, and disposable use-supported nanoelectrospray
solution for MS-based bioanalyses.