Investigation on Chiral Amino Acids Enantiomeric Excess With Cyclodextrin Inclusion Complex Ions Assisted Differential Ion Mobility Separation Mass Spectrometry

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Development of a rapid, inexpensive, and specific method for chiral amino acids (AAs) identification and separation is challenging owing to their similar properties. In this work, a chiral AAs separation method was developed by analyzing the AAs‐cyclodextrin (CD) host–guest complex in the CaptiveSpray‐DMS‐MS system. Compared with β‐ and γ‐CDs, α‐CD was revealed to provide the best differentiation performance. The optimized conditions enabled the analysis of six pairs of respective AA‐α‐CD complexes within several minutes. Ionograms obtained using this strategy effectively determined the enantiomeric ratio of chiral AAs, as illustrated by the strong linearity (R2 = 0.996) between peak abundance ratios and molar ratios of L‐serine and D‐serine. This method does not require the use of metal ions, and the single peak shape in ionograms of chiral AA‐α‐CD complex ions simplifies data interpretation.