Brooke Brown is a Junior Chemistry major at Baylor University. She comes from Durham, North Carolina. She joined the team in mid January of 2015. She plans on pursuing a PhD in Chemistry after graduation from Baylor University in May of 2017. She previously served in the US Army from 2010-2013. While serving, she worked in the public health area.
Current Research:
“Ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) is a rapid separation technique for characterization of conformational and structural differences between gas-phase ions, including ionized biomolecules. Structural and mass analyses of gas-phase ions can be simultaneously achieved by positioning IM separation prior to mass spectrometry analysis (i.e., IM-MS). However, due to limitations in IM resolving power, isomers with similar collision cross sections (CCSs) may not be sufficiently separated or successfully characterized. For example, we will show that the multiple isomeric ions may co-elute from an IM device and make successful characterization of the isomeric components very challenging. In IM, co-elution of multiple isomeric ions from the IM drift tube may result in a single “Gaussian-like” IM distribution; such isobaric mixtures can be erroneously identified as a single component. Recently, we demonstrated that IM and MS spectra of co-eluting isomeric ions could be obtained using chemometric data deconvolution. However, a method to identify co-elution (and thus candidates for deconvolution) has not been reported.
We are working on plotting IM arrival times versus IM profiles’ full width at half height and using them to identify co-eluting isomers when compared to known analyte-class calibration or trend lines. For instance, molecules falling off of the trend line (i.e., IM peak width is wider than it “should” be at that specific arrival time) can be categorized as targets for deconvolution. Initial experiments were performed on a mixture of poly-alanine, hexapeptide isomers, and substance p. The long-term goal of the present study is to apply this method for rapid and automated identification of cancerous biomarkers.”
Publications:
1. Brantley, M., Pettit, M., Harper, B., Brown, B., Solouki, T., “Automated Peak Width Measurements for Targeted Analysis of Ion Mobility Unresolved Species.” Analytica Chemica Acta 2016, 941, 49-60.
Oral Presentations:
1. Brown, B.; Harper, B.; Solouki, T. “Utilizing Ion Mobility Profiles for Rapid identification of Co-eluting Multiple Conformers and Structural Isomers” 2015 Chemistry and Biochemistry Undergraduate Research Symposium, 2015, Waco, TX.
