The First European Meeting on Tandem Mass Spectrometry

The First European Meeting on Tandem Mass Spectrometry was held between 9 and 11 July 1990 at UMIST, Manchester, UK. The Meeting was attended by 95 delegates from all part$ of the world who were presented with a full programme of 6 Plenary Lectures, 15 oral papers and 15 poster presentations. The meeting was structured to cover many of the diverse areas touched by the technique of tandem mass spectrometry. Topics covered included the history and recent developments of the technique, ion optics, ion structure studies, dissociation processes and applications ranging from biological chemistry, through environmental chemistry to polymer and dyestuffs chemistry. It was a considerable pleasure to the audience that one of the organizers, Professor Micky Barber (UMIST), had recovered from illness and was able to open the Meeting and to welcome delegates to an untypically sunny Manchester.

Professor John Beynon (University College, Swansea and Editor of Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry) delivered the first Plenary Lecture, giving an entertaining insight into his experiences in mass spectrometry and the history of development of the tandem techniques. Following this was a Plenary Lecture from one of Beynon’s former co-workers, Graham Cooks (Purdue University), who brought the audience up-to-date with recent developments with special reference to research being carried out in his laboratories. Thoughtfully, for the majority of the audience, Henk Boerboom’s (ex-FOM Institute, Amsterdam) treatise on ion optical consider- ations covered the subject beginning from the ‘simple’ concepts of sector studies, thus allowing the delegates gradually to get to grips with his summary of focal planes, curved magnet boundaries and quadrupole lenses. The afternoon session closed with discussions on other instrumental developments from the Canterbury group and from instrument manufacturers.

Helmut Schwarz (Technical University of Berlin) opened the second day with a Plenary Lecture on ion structures and their investigation by tandem mass spectrometry. He gave a particularly relevant insight into the possible misinterpretations that can be made, even when a technique as powerful as tandem mass spectrometry is used. Ray March (Trent University, Ontario) and J-C Tabet (Paris) completed this session with contrasting examples of the use of tandem mass spectrometry to probe ion structures.

As a preamble to the poster session, authors were asked to introduce themselves and to give a brief oral summary of their work prior to the official session allocated to this type of presentation. Fifteen posters were presented covering a wide range of applications and some theoretical considerations relevant to quadrupole collision cells.

Keith Jenning’s (University of Warwick) Plenary Lecture on dissociation processes dealt with the ways in which the internal energy of mass-selected ions could be increased as a precursor to fragmentation. He distinguished between processes-gas collision and surface dissociation-in which a small fraction of translational energy is converted to internal energy, and those in which additional energy is absorbed from a beam of photons or electrons. The final three speakers on the second day ranged over applications in the areas of dioxin analysis and pharmaceutical chemistry and interfacing of liquid systems to a tandem mass spectrometer through a membrane inlet.

Willi Richter (Ciba-Geigy AG, Basel) gave the final Plenary Lecture on his elegant application of tandem mass spectrometry to the complex problem of the identification of the key structural features-sugar composition and sequence, branching, and isomerism of interglycosidic bonds- in the analysis of glycoconjugates. This lecture introduced the final session which covered a variety of applications of tandem mass spectrometry to the solution of problems arising from medical, academic and industrial environments.

The final summary and closing address were given by Keith Jennings with an invitation to those present to attend the Second European Meeting on Tandem Mass Spectrometry to be held at the University of Warwick from 20-22 July 1992.

MIKE MORRIS The Centre for Mass Spectrometry UMIST Manchester UK 8 August 1990

The following papers represent a selection of the contributions to this first meeting.

384 RAPID COMMUNICATIONS IN MASS SPECTROMETRY, VOL. 4, NO. 10. 1990 0 John Wiley & Sons Limited, 1990