Mass Spectrometric Coverage of Complex Mixtures: Exploring the Carbon Space of Crude Oil

Mass spectrometry is a powerful tool to investigate complex reactions in complex matrices such as crude oils. However, certain requirements have to be met. Apart from a good instrument sensitivity and mass measurement accuracy, especially a certain minimum mass resolving power of above 500,000 at m/z 1000 needs to be reached to resolve critical peak pairs. If the desired parameters are met, a good coverage of the full compositional space or “carbon space” can be achieved to allow a comprehensive picture of the sample at hand. Here, the performance of a newly introduced High-field Fourier Transform Orbitrap setup with nominal resolving power of 960,000 at m/z 400 is tested against the demands