Today was the last day in the lab for our first intern, Helen, who was working with cyclic ion mobility.
Helen joined the group in October as part of her Erasmus+ traineeship. Her project was to work on the structural identification of caffeine metabolites with two-dimensional ion mobility. But as sometimes in research happens, Helen found so much more. During her internship, Helen was able to not only separate the isomeric metabolites but also discover interesting patterns in the ionization of such highly complicated molecules. We were able to see how high-resolution ion mobility enables us to follow the equilibrium of tautomeric structures in the gas phase. Who could have thought that tautomers can be separated in the ion mobility? And though the full potential of two-dimensional ion mobility is definitely yet to be discovered it already proved very useful in understanding and influencing the gas phase equilibria.
The manuscript is in preparation and we hope to roll it out asap for everyone to benefit from the findings that cyclic IMS is offering.
Helen has headed off to an exchange semester at Korea University. Good luck in South-Korea!