A four dimensional separation method based on continuous heart-cutting gas chromatography with ion mobility and high resolution mass spectrometry

A two-dimensional GC (2D-GC) method was developed and coupled to an ion mobility-high resolution mass spectrometer, which enables the separation of complex samples in four dimensions (2D-GC, ion mobilility spectrometry and mass spectrometry). This approach works as a continuous multiheart-cutting GC-system (GC + GC), using a long modulation time of 20 s, which allows the complete transfer of most of the first dimension peaks to the second dimension column without fractionation, in comparison to comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography (GCxGC). Hence, each compound delivers only one peak in the second dimension, which simplifies the data handling even when ion mobility spectrometry as a third and mass spectrometry as a fourth dimension are introduced. The analysis of a plant extract from Calendula officinales shows the separation power of this four dimensional separation method. The introduction of ion mobility spectrometry provides an additional separation dimension and allows to determine collision cross sections (CCS) of the analytes as a further physicochemical constant supporting the identification. A CCS database with more than 800 standard substances including drug-like compounds and pesticides was used for CCS data base search in this work.