• Mass Spectrometry Letters
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.77-80
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• 2018

The focus of this paper is to present techniques to overcome certain difficulties in quantitative analysis with a time-of-flight mass spectrometer (TOF-MS). The method is based on conventional solid-phase extraction, followed by reversed-phase ultra high performance liquid chromatography of the extract, and mass spectrometric analysis. The target compounds included atenolol, atrazine, caffeine, carbamazepine, diclofenac, estrone, ibuprofen, naproxen, simazine, sucralose, sulfamethoxazole, and triclosan. The matrix effects caused by high concentrations of organic compounds in wastewater are especially significant in electrospray ionization mass spectroscopy. Internal-standard calibration with isotopically labeled standards corrects the results for many matrix effects, but some peculiarities were observed. The problems encountered in quantitation of carbamazepine and triclosan, due to nonlinear calibration were solved by changing the internal standard and using a narrower mass window. With simazine, the use of a quadratic calibration curve was the best solution.

• Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology
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• v.23 no.7
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• pp.923-931
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• 2013

Rapamycin, known as an inhibitor of Target of Rapamycin (TOR), is an immunosuppressant drug used to prevent rejection in organ transplantation. Despite the close association of the TOR signaling cascade with various scopes of metabolism, it has not yet been thoroughly investigated at the metabolome level. In our current study, we applied mass spectrometric analysis for profiling primary metabolism in order to capture the responsive dynamics of the Chlamydomonas metabolome to the inhibition of TOR by rapamycin. Accordingly, we identified the impact of the rapamycin treatment at the level of metabolomic phenotypes that were clearly distinguished by multivariate statistical analysis. Pathway analysis pinpointed that inactivation of the TCA cycle was accompanied by the inhibition of cellular growth. Relative to the constant suppression of the TCA cycle, most amino acids were significantly increased in a time-dependent manner by longer exposure to rapamycin treatment, after an initial down-regulation at the early stage of exposure. Finally, we explored the isolation of the responsive metabolic factors into the rapamycin treatment and the culture duration, respectively.

• Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.17 no.11
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• pp.1036-1039
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• 1996

Synthetic lipoidal peptides based on viral protein sequences have been prepared. These peptides contain an N-palmitoyl group at the N-terminal residue, which is a modified cysteine, containing a S-[2,3-bis(acyloxy)-(2-R,S)-propyl] moiety. When this residue (Pam3Cys) is at the N-terminus of a synthetic peptide, it acts as potent immunoadjuvant to enhance both IgM and IgG antibody responses to the attached peptide. Conventional analytical procedures (e.g., Edman degradation and amino acid analysis) are either not applicable due to the N-terminal modification, or do not provide confirmation of the intact structure. Chromatographic analysis is also hindered by the tendency of these lipoidal Pam3Cys peptides to form large aggregates, and in some cases to be permanently adsorbed on reversed phase columns. We have applied several mass spectrometric techniques, including fast atom bombardment (FAB), electrospray ionization (ESI) and matrix assisted laser desorption ionization (MALDI) to characterize the intact structures of a number of different Pam3Cys synthetic peptides. The MALDI-MS has been found to be the most sensitive for the analysis of the structure of Pam3Cys peptides.

• Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.10 no.6
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• pp.524-529
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• 1989

A glow discharge mass spectrometric(GDMS) analytical method was developed for direct analysis of impurities in solids. Ions extracted from a glow discharge ion source with a sample as a cathode were analyzed by a quadrupole mass filter. Ion extractions were carried out through differentially-pumped orifices biased to positive and negative potentials. Operating parameters of the glow discharge source such as discharge current, orifice-to-cathode distance, energy analyzer setting and bias voltages have been optimized. The developed GDMS was applied to the analysis of KSS copper-base alloy standards certified by Korea Standards Research Institute(KSRI). In the analysis, the reproducibility and the detection limits were estimated to be about 2.5% RSD, and in the low ppm range, respectively.

• Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.250-254
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• 2009

Contamination of microcystins, a family of heptapeptide hepatotoxins, in eutrophic water bodies is a worldwide problem. Due to their poisoning effects on animals and humans, there is a requirement to characterize and quantify all microcystins present in a sample. As microcystins are, for most part, intracellular toxins produced by some genera of cyanobacteria, lysing cyanobacterial cells to release all microcystins is considered an important step. To date, although many cell lysis methods have been used, little work has been conducted comparing the results of those different methods. In this study, various methods for cell lysis and toxin extraction from the cell lysates were investigated, including sonication, bead beating, freeze/thaw, lyophilization and lysing with TritonX-100 surfactant. It was found that lyophilization, followed by extraction with 75% methanol, was the most effective for extracting toxins from Microcystis aeruginosa cells. Another important step prior to the analysis is removing impurities and concentrating the target analyte. For these purposes, a C18 Sep-Pak solid phase extraction cartridge was used, with the percentage of the eluent methanol also evaluated. As a result, methanol percentages higher than 75% appeared to be the best eluting solvent in terms of microcystin-leucine-arginine (MC-LR) recovery efficiency for the further chromatographic and mass spectrometric analyses.

• KSBB Journal
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.263-269
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• 2016

For decades, the microorganisms in arctic soils have been newly discovered according to the climate change and global warming. In this study, the chemical structure of a lipid A molecule from Pseudomonas sp. strain PAMC 28615 which was newly discovered from arctic soils was characterized by mass spectrometric approaches such as matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight (MALDI-TOF) and MALDI multi-stage tandem mass spectrometry (MS). First, lipopolysaccharide (LPS) from Pseudomonas sp. strain PAMC 28615 was extracted and subsequently hydrolyzed to obtain the lipid A. The parent ion peak at m/z 1632 was determined by MALDI-TOF MS, which also can validate our lipid A purification method. For detailed structural determination, we performed the multiple-stage tandem mass analysis ($MS^4$) of the parent ion, and subsequently the abundant fragment ions in each MS stage are tested. The fragment ions in each MS stage were produced from the loss of phosphate groups and fatty acyl groups, which could be used to confirm the composition or the position of the lipid A components. Consequently, the mass spectrometry-based lipid A profiling method could provide the detail chemical structure of lipid A from the Pseudomonas sp. strain PAMC 28615 as an arctic bacterium from the frozen arctic soil.

• Journal of the Korean Chemical Society
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• v.27 no.6
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• pp.424-482
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• 1983

Determination for $Ta_2O_5$,$Nb_2O_5$ and $SnO_2$ in tin slags was investigated by X-ray spectrometric method. Standard addition-dilution method was attempted and showed a comparable accuracy with standard calibration curve method. Pure chemicals($Ta_2O_5$,$Nb_2O_5$ and $SnO_2$) were added to the samples and diluted with silica or ferric oxide. For the determination of $Ta_2O_5$and$SnO_2$ , silica was more suitable than ferric oxide while the latter was more preferable than the former for $Nb_2O_5$.

• Mass Spectrometry Letters
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.33-36
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• 2011

The misuse of anabolic androgenic steroids is of particular concern in sports and society. Thus, it is of great importance to discriminate endogenous steroids such as testosterone or testosterone prohormones from their chemically identical synthetic copies. In this study, gas chromatography-combustion/isotope ratio mass spectrometric (GC-C/IRMS) method has been developed and validated for discriminating the origin of anabolic androgenic steroids. The method involves the solid-phase extraction, enzymatic hydrolysis with ${\beta}$-glucuronidase, HPLC-fractionation for the cleanup and analysis by GC-C/IRMS. The difference(${\Delta}^{13}C$) of urinary ${\delta}^{13}C$ values between synthetic analogues and endogenous reference compounds (ERC) by GC-C/IRMS was used to elucidate the origin of steroids, and intra- and inter-day precision, specificity and isotope fractionation were evaluated. The present GC-C/IRMS method combined with HPLC cleanup was accurate and reproducible enough to be successfully applied to the test of urine sample from suspected anabolic steroid abusers.

• KOREAN JOURNAL OF CROP SCIENCE
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• v.56 no.3
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• pp.244-249
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• 2011

A sensitive and rapid high-performance liquid chromatographic-tandem mass spectrometric (HPLC/MS/MS) assay was developed for the determination of soyasaponins in soybean. Among soyasaponins, soyasaponin I was isolated and characterized from methanol extracts of soybean as analytical standards and the development of a new analytical procedure for quantification of its content in various cultivars. The structures of these compound was elucidated by $^1H$, $^{13}C$ NMR experiments and by mass spectrometric analysis. Aqueous ethanol extracts of soybean samples were injected on an Agilent XDB-C18 column ($4.6mm{\times}50mm$, $1.8{\mu}m$) with a mobile phase consisting of 10 mM ammonium acetate-acetonitrile, a flow rate of 0.3 mL/min and a total run time of 8 min. Detection was performed by mass spectrometer bin the multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) mode with negative electrospray ionization (ESI) m/z at 941 ${\rightarrow}$ 615 for soyasaponin I. In the 9 soybean samples, contents of soyasaponin I ranged from 205 to 726 mg/kg, and correlated negatively with seed size.

• Mass Spectrometry Letters
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.80-84
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• 2015

Here, we demonstrate the use of MALDI-TOF as a fast and simple analytical approach to evaluate the DNA-binding capability of various peptides. Specifically, by varying the amino acid sequence of the peptides consisting of lysine (K) and tryptophan (W), we identified peptides with strong DNA-binding capabilities using MALDI-TOF. Mass spectrometric analysis reveals an interesting novel finding that lysine residues show sequence selective preference, which used to be considered as mediator of electrostatic interactions with DNA phosphate backbones. Moreover, tryptophan residues show higher affinity to DNA than lysine residues. Since there are numerous possible combinations to make peptide oligomers, it is valuable to introduce a simple and reliable analytical approach in order to quickly identify DNA-binding peptides.