Kinetic method for enantiomeric determination of thyroid hormone (d,l-thyroxine) using electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry (ESI-MS/MS)

A rapid, sensitive, simple and accurate mass spectrometric analysis for the recognition and quantitation of d- and l-thyroxine (d- and l-T4) was achieved by using kinetic method. The method uses the kinetics of competitive unimolecular fragmentations of trimeric transition metal ion-bound clusters formed under electrospray ionization (ESI). Singly charged cluster ions containing the divalent central metal ion Ca(II)/Mn(II), an amino acid/modified amino acid chiral reference, and the analyte d- and l-T4 were generated by ESI. The cluster ion of interest was mass-selected, and subjected to collision-induced dissociation for undergoing dissociation by competitive loss of either a neutral reference or a neutral analyte. The chiral selectivity (Rchiral), the ratio of the two competitive dissociation rates (abundances of fragment ion) containing the analyte in one enantiomeric form expressed relative to that for the fragments of the other enantiomer, ranges from 0.46 to 3.03. Method by using fixed ligand such as peptide has also successfully improved chiral recognition and quantitative accuracy, which simplifies the dissociation kinetics, in which only the reference ligand or the analyte can be lost. The linear relationship between the logarithm of the fragment ion abundance ratio (ln R) and enantiomeric compositions (ee%) of the T4 allows the chiral purity of enantiomeric mixtures to be determined. The average relative errors were less than 2% between the actual and experimental enantiomeric compositions.