Mass spectrometers are used by almost all chemists and many researchers from neighboring disciplines such as physics,medicine,or biology as a powerful a- lytical tool. Its advantages are high sensitivity,speed,and almost no sample c- sumption. During the last two decades,mass spectrometry experienced a boom of new developments pushing its limits further and further at an increasing speed just similar to the progress in NMR spectroscopy in the 1970s. However,a mass spectrometer does not only serve as a machine for solving complicated analytical problems,it evolved meanwhile to a complete laboratory for the investigation of molecules,clusters,and other species under the envir- ment-free conditions of the highly diluted gas phase. These special conditions existing only in high vacuum change the properties of the particles under study significantly with respect to their energetics and reaction pathways. For ex- ple,temperature is a macroscopic property of a large ensemble of particles in thermal equilibrium and is thus not defined for a single ion. This fact has severe implications for the measurement of kinetic and thermodynamic data of g- phase species. On the other hand,the examination of gas-phase properties has the advantage that systems reduced to minimum complexity can be studied more easily without the complicated influences of solvents or counterions. In parti- lar, the combination of isotopic labeling and mass spectrometry allows for a detailed analysis of reaction mechanisms or conformational analysis through H/D exchange experiments not only on biomolecules.

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Autorentext
Christoph Schalley has received his PhD under the guidance of Helmut Schwarz and did his postdoctorate with Julius Rebek at the Scripps Research Institute in California. Currently, he is assistant professor in Bonn and has already authored more than 85 publications and four books. He was awarded with the Dozentenstipendium in 2004 of the Fonds der Chemischen Industrie.

Inhalt
Reactivity.- Physical Organic Chemistry of the Gas Phase. Reactivity Trends for Organic Cations.- Mass Spectrometric Approaches to Interstellar Chemistry.- Transient Intermediates of Chemical Reactions by Neutralization-Reionization Mass Spectrometry.- Metalorganic Chemistry.- Diastereoselective Effects in Gas-Phase Ion Chemistry.- Metalorganic Chemistry in the Gas Phase: Insight into Catalysis.- Mass Spectrometric Methodology.- Gas-Phase Conformations: The Ion Mobility/Ion Chromatography Method.- Threshold Collision-Induced Dissociations for the Determination of Accurate Gas-Phase Binding Energies and Reaction Barriers.- Medicinal Chemistry.- Investigating Viral Proteins and Intact Viruses with Mass Spectrometry.- High-Throughput Mass Spectrometry for Compound Characterization in Drug Discovery.