Amino-β-cyclodextrin Complex Assisted Ionization for Labile Sesamins and their Ion-mobility Separation in ESI Q-TOF MS

Sesamin, one of the lignans in sesame seed, was a labile compound in MS and it was reported that the protonated mol- ecule of sesamin decomposed easily in ES ionization process and it cannot be detected (G. Yan, et al., Rapid Commun Mass Spectrom. 2007, 21, 3613-3620). To protect labile compounds, an amino-cyclodextrin (NCyD) was added to the sample to pro- mote the host-guest interaction complex in ESI-MS. As a result, sesamin was ionized as the NCyD-sesamin-NCyD (1:2) com- plex without undesired decomposition, suggesting that the amino-CyDs assist the ionization of the labile molecules capped with CyDs by host-guest interaction and these compounds were ionized without their decomposition, those are like amino-CyD com- plex-assisted ionization. The amino-CyD complexes of sesamin and sesamolin were also analyzed by their ion-mobility MS.