Lee Laboratory
for Biological Mass Spectrometry
Department of Chemistry
Iowa State University
High-resolution Mass Spectrometric Analysis of Bio-oils (inactive)
Biomass fast pyrolysis is a promising and sustainable technique that thermochemically converts lignocellulosic biomass into energy-dense liquids or bio-oils which can be upgraded to biofuels and/or other chemicals. We adopt petroleomics approach to study complex nature of bio-oils. In an initial approach using laser-desorption ionization orbitrap mass spectrometry, over one hundred bio-oil compositions were obtained (Smith and Lee, Energy Fuels, 2010). Using negative ion mode electrospray ionization combined with Fourier-transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry, over eight hundred chemical compositions were determined (Smith et al., Energy Fuels, 2012).
Contour plot of pine tree bio-oils obtained with laser-desorption ionization orbitrap demonstrates the presence of lignin dimers and trimers. Smith and Lee. Energy Fuels, 2010.
In an application to switch grass bio-oils, we used this approach to characterize majority of nitrogen compounds have pyridine or immidazole core structure. Cole et al., Fuels, 2013.
Recently, we have developed a new instrumentation directly connecting a drop-tube microfurnace with a fast scanning time-of-flight mass spectrometer to study kinetics of biomass pyrolysis in molecular level. (Hutchinson et al., J. Anal. Appl Pyrol. 2018)
We developed pyrolysis GC-tandem mass spectrometry for lignin analysis. Adopting CSI:FingerID, we could analyze MS/MS spectra of lignin pyrolyzates that cannot be analyzed by EI-MS due to the lack in NIST database (Larson & Lee, J. Am. Soc. Mass. Spectrom. 2018)
