Congratulations to Anna Bakhtina!

Congratulations to Anna Bakhtina, who has accepted an offer to enter the Ph.D. program in Genome Sciences at the University of Washington. As an undergraduate student researcher in the Bush Lab, Anna investigated the effects of drift gas selection on the ion mobility of petroleum and biomolecular ions. We are excited to follow her research over in Genome Sciences!

Congratulations to Evan Hubbard!

Congratulations to Evan Hubbard, who has accepted an offer to enter the Ph.D. program in Chemistry at the University of California, Riverside. As an undergraduate student researcher in the Bush Lab, Evan investigated fundamental aspects of electrospray ionization in the context of native mass spectrometry. We are excited to follow his research at UCR!

New Publication: Principles of Ion Selection, Alignment, and Focusing in Tandem Ion Mobility

Principles of Ion Selection, Alignment, and Focusing in Tandem Ion Mobility Implemented Using Structures for Lossless Ion Manipulations (SLIM).
Rachel M. Eaton, Samuel J. Allen, Matthew F. Bush. J. Am. Soc. Mass Spectrom. 2019, DOI: 10.1007/s13361-019-02170-1. (Link)

Tandem ion mobility (IM) enables the characterization of subpopulations of ions from larger ensembles, including differences that cannot be resolved in a single dimension of IM. Tandem IM consists of at least two IM regions that are each separated by an ion selection region. In many implementations of tandem IM, ions eluting from a dimension of separation are filtered and immediately transferred to the subsequent dimension of separation (selection-only experiments). We recently reported a mode of operation in which ions eluting from a dimension are trapped prior to the subsequent dimension (selection-trapping experiments), which was implemented on an instrument constructed using the structures for lossless ion manipulations (SLIM) architecture. Here, we use a combination of experiments and trajectory simulations to characterize aspects of the selection, trapping, and separation processes underlying these modes of operation. For example, the actual temporal profile of filtered ions can be very similar to the width of the waveforms used for selection, but depending on experimental parameters, can differ by up to ± 500 μs. Experiments and simulations indicate that ions in selection-trapping experiments can be spatially focused between dimensions, which removes the broadening that occurred during the preceding dimension. During focusing, individual ions are thermalized, which aligns and establishes common initial conditions for the subsequent dimension. Therefore, selection-trapping experiments appear to offer significant advantages relative to selection-only experiments, which we anticipate will become more pronounced in future experiments that make use of longer IM separations, additional dimensions of analysis, and the outcomes of this study.

Updates to our Collision Cross Section Database

The Bush Lab Collision Cross Section database continues to be an important resource for the ion mobility community. Our database is accessed ~5,000 times per year by researchers from around the world (~70% North America, ~25% Europe, ~5% Asia). Recent updates to our group website had made it more challenging to interact with our data, which has now prompted us to make our data more accessible and provide access to even more of the collision cross sections measured by the Bush Lab.

We hope that these changes make this data more accessible and useful for the ion mobility spectrometry community. It you have any feedback or suggestions, please feel free to email Matt Bush.

New NIH Award!

The Bush Lab was just awarded a grant from the National Institutes of Health for a project titled “Increasing the Selectivity of Hybrid Mass Spectrometry Using Multidimensional Ion Mobility Spectrometry” (R01 GM130708). We are excited to pursue this research and are grateful for this financial support from the NIH.

Matt Bush appointed as an Affiliate of the UW eScience Institute

The Bush Lab is excited to join the eScience Institute, which empowers researchers and students in all fields to answer fundamental questions through the use of large, complex, and noisy data. As the hub of data-intensive discovery on campus, the eScience Institute leads a community of innovators in the techniques, technologies, and best practices of data science and the fields that depend on them.

Snow in Seattle!

Snow is rare in Seattle, which makes us appreciate it more than people in most places. Here are some pictures from near our lab.