Tannic Acid: a Novel Calibrator for Facile and Accurate Mass Measurement of Electrospray Ionization Mass Spectrometry

J Am Soc Mass Spectrom. 2019 Aug;30(8):1545-1549. doi: 10.1007/s13361-019-02211-9. Epub 2019 Jun 18.

Abstract

Accurate mass calibration is beneficial to the identification of the unknown compounds quickly and accurately. The ESI mass spectrum of tannic acid (TA) tends to a normal distribution of the cluster ion peaks in m/z range from 371.0368 to 1739.1169. Based on the interesting result, we reported the use of TA, a natural plant polyphenol, as a novel calibrator for electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESI MS), which has the following three advantages, including (1) easy preparation, (2) the calibration range of m/z 200~2000, and (3) the calibration error is around 3.00 ppm in positive ion mode, which is less than the use of sodium formate (SF) and Prod #88323 calibrators. This TA calibrator has great potential for the wide applications in biological, chemical, and pharmacal analysis.

Keywords: Calibrator; Electrospray ionization mass spectrometry; Mass measurement; Tannic acid.