The characterization of selected drugs with infrared laser desorption/tunable synchrotron vacuum ultraviolet photoionization mass spectrometry

Some selected drugs including captopril, fudosteine and racecadotril have been analyzed by infrared (IR) laser desorption/tunable synchrotron vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) photoionization mass spectrometry (PIMS). The molecular ions of captopril and racecadotril are exclusively observed without any fragments at near threshold single-photon ionization (SPI). However, fudosteine easily forms fragments even at a photon energy near the ionization threshold, indicating the instability of its molecular ion. For these drugs, a number of fragments are yielded with the increase of photon energy. The structures of such fragments proposed by IR LD/VUV PIMS are supported by electron ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (EI-TOFMS) results. Fragmentation pathways are discussed in detail. Copyright (C) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.