In this presentation, the applicability of GC in combination with atmospheric pressure chemical ionisation mass spectroscopy (APCI-MS) and with supersonic molecular beam ionisation mass spectroscopy (SMB-MS) will be demonstrated for the characterisation of tobacco leaves and tobacco smoke. Both ionisation techniques are compatible with high temperature GC, extending the GC application range to high molecular weight solutes.

These soft ionisation techniques are especially useful for the identification of important apolar compounds, such as waxes, sterols, sterol esters and lipids. Using classical electron impact ionisation, strong fragmentation is obtained for these solutes, making unequivocal identification difficult. Soft ionisation in combination with accurate mass MS and/or software tools allowing molecular formula generation (e.g. Mass Works, Tel Aviv IAA) offers complementary information that helps to unravel the complexity of tobacco leaf and smoke composition.

Also in the field of metabolomics interesting results are obtained. For the analysis of polar fractions in biological materials (containing amino acids, sugars, etc.), silylation is often applied prior to GC-MS analysis. However, fragmentation in EI-MS mostly leads to non-characteristic fragment ions, making identification of possible biomarkers difficult. GC-APCI-MS and GC-SMB-MS can be used alternatively, resulting in easier feature extraction and identification.