We have studied the fragmentation of the singly protonated L- and D-forms of enantiomerically pure phenylalanine (Phe), tryptophan (Trp), and methionine (Met) in high-energy collisions with chiral and achiral gas targets. (S)-(+)-2-butanol, racemic (+/-)-2-butanol, and argon were used as target gases. At center-of-mass frame collision energy of I key, it was found that all of the ions exhibit common fragmentation pathways which are independent of target chirality. For all projectile ions, the elimination of NH3 and H2O + CO were found to be the main reaction channels. The observed fragmentation patterns were dominated by statistically driven processes. The energy deposited into the ions was found to be sufficient to yield multiple fragment ions, which arise from decomposition via various competitive reaction pathways.

Here we report on the gas-phase interactions between protonated enantiopure amino acids (l- and d-enantiomers of Met, Phe, and Trp) and chiral target gases [(R)- and (S)-2-butanol, and (S)-1-phenylethanol] in 0.1-10.0 eV low-energy collisions. Two major processes are seen to occur over this collision energy regime, collision-induced dissociation and ion-molecule complex formation. Both processes were found to be independent of the stereo-chemical composition of the interacting ions and targets. These data shed light on the currently debated mechanisms of gas-phase chiral selectivity by demonstrating the inapplicability of the three-point model to these interactions, at least under single collision conditions.

In this work we report the stereo-dependent collision-induced dissociation (CID) of proton-bound complexes of tryptophan and 2-butanol. The dissociation efficiency was measured as a function of collision energy in single collision mode. The homochiral complex was found to be less stable against CID than a heterochiral one. Additional gas dependence measurements were performed with diastereomeric complexes that confirm the findings.

We have studied the collision induced dissociation reactions of proton-bound diastereomeric adducts of S-(-)-1-phenylethanol and enantiomers of three different amino acids (tryptophan, phenylalanine, methionine) with argon at a collision energy of 0.5 eV in the center-of-mass frame. At this energy, fragmentation into the alcohol and the protonated amino acid was the only observed product channel. Contrary to anticipation, the fragmentation was found to be insensitive to the chirality of the constituents. The results obtained from quantum chemical calculations show that the hetero-chiral adducts are more stable than the homo-chiral forms. However, given the experimental conditions in the ion source, it is likely that multiple conformers which lie close in energy to the ground-state configuration are populated, limiting the experimental sensitivity to observe the predicted differences.