Desorption electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry for detection of 24 carcinogenic aromatic amines in textiles

Because of its significant advantages including minimal sample pretreatment, easy ambient sample manipulation, high sensitivity, high specificity, and high throughput, desorption electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry (DESI-MSⁿ) has been successfully applied for the fast nondestructive detection of carcinogenic aromatic amines on various textile samples. Under the optimized experimental conditions, 24 aromatic amines were directly detected as protonated molecules by using a mixture of methanol/water/acetic acid (49:49: 2, v/v/v) as the electrospray liquid. The average analysis time for each sample was less than 30 s, making DESI-MS a high-throughput screening tool for textile examination. The false positive signals (having the same m/ z values as those from the aromatic amines) could be excluded by using tandem DESI mass spectrometry. The detection limit for most of the aromatic amines in this study was on the order of low femtograms per squared millimeter by utilizing the characteristic fragments from DESI-MS/MS experiments. The typical RSD values for this method were found to be 5%-10% for six measurements (S/N = 3) of the same sample. These results show that DESI-MSⁿ is reliable and the most sensitive analytical tool available for the rapid and nondestructive detection of carcinogenic aromatic amines on textile products. The technique has promising applications for inline quality monitoring in the textile industry.