Unravelling the Chemical Complexity in Prebiotic Planetary Chemistry and Astrochemistry using Separation Orthogonality in Liquid Chromatography – Mass Spectrometry (LCMS).
Project Outline
To mimic the conditions of early earth and the interstellar medium (ISM), laboratory based astrochemical and planetary studies typically involve the irradiation of ice/grain/minerals/molecules with energetic sources, such as ion beams, electrons and photons, and the resultant chemistry is monitored in-situ using FT-IR (Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy), QMS (quadrupole mass spectrometry) and ex-situ using a range of chromatographic, spectrophotometric, and spectrometric technique.
A facility, to be known as KEEPS (Kent Early Earth and Planetary System), is being constructed as part of a wider European strategy (The Europlanet consortium) and will be hosted at the University of Kent. The objective is to build an automated facility that provides the ability to control, measure, analyse, and run long-term experiments to explore the emergent and complex chemical space in conditions representative of early Earth, planetary, exoplanetary and ISM condition. The purpose of this research projects is to develop orthogonal chromatographic methods with subsequent mass spectrometric data analysis to enable non-targeted analysis of complex mixtures. This project will develop High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) methods, with differing column chemistries and eluents, coupled to HRMS (High Resolution Mass Spec) to screen and detect both known and unknown products. The mass spec domain will be used to mine structural information of both the known and unknown products with a view identification and structural elucidation of the components in the complex mixture.
Background
Within planetary, exo-planetary and ISM environments, Complex Organic Molecules (COMs) form from the energetic processing of ice/grain mantles/minerals/molecules resulting in an emerging chemical complexity leading to molecules of biological interest. Typical analytical approaches use a targeted approach, where known or expected chemical products, are analysed using methodologies developed for their detection. Non-targeted uses orthogonal methodologies whereby where known or expected chemical products, as well as unknowns, are analysed using orthogonal methodologies of different column chemistries and eluents through the analysis of their relative retention times and mass spectra data analysis. Techniques employed in metabolomics, drug discovery and the application of Machine Learning (ML) feature extraction and noise reduction will be used. Conceptually, the project is shown below.
This project will involve the following: –
- Development and validation of orthogonal HPLC conditions for the analysis of prebiotic reaction products from the energetic processing of plausible ISM and planetary conditions
- Development of a data processing workflow considering, filtering, feature detection, alignment and normalisation
- Application of ML techniques to extract the important features from the complex reaction chemistry
The project will involve working with national and international collaborators using high resolution mass spectrometry and HPLC as well as contributing to the design of experimental reactors and chambers.
For more details and discussion of the project contact Prof. Nigel Mason.