Authors: Anneli Kruve
Source: Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry (article, 2018-10-30)
Field: Chemistry — Spectroscopy

Meet the Associate Editors: Anneli Kruve I am currently associated with two research groups. My group at the University of Tartu is studying the ionization mechanism and behavior in electrospray ionization. We are focusing on the ability to predict ionization efficiencies for compounds based on their calculated physicochemical properties. Such predictions would give two very important benefits. First, by revealing the physicochemical properties that are relevant for ionization we can understand the ionization process much better. Secondly, predicted ionization efficiencies are required to quantify substances that do not have standard substances available. This is a very common problem in metabolomics, environmental analyses, etc. So far, we have demonstrated that such predictions are possible and can improve the accuracy of our predictions by a factor of 10. Additionally, I am a guest scientist in Prof. Schalley's group in the Free University of Berlin. Schalley's group is focusing on assembling and characterizing supramolecular structures. In the latter, mass spectrometry combined with ion mobility and IRMPD is playing a key role. Mass spectrometry kind of came to me. I started off working with HPLC in a biomedicine lab as an undergraduate and slowly moved towards using MS as a detector. Soon the magical word of mass spectrometry rolled out in front of me. I was immediately fascinated by the magic still surrounding the ionization techniques and started working on the matrix effect in my PhD studies. This path has certainly not been limited to conventional analytical chemistry, but has opened up doors to combine environmental chemistry, organic syntheses and even instrument construction. On my first trial with MS my supervisor, Dr. K. Herodes, asked me to analyse an extract from a viper venom. Such a sample had been sent to the Testing Centre in Tartu by one pharmaceutical company. I can still remember how puzzling the first HPLC/MS chromatogram looked to me. Today, I am pretty sure my supervisor specifically chose this extremely complex sample to show me how powerful but complex this method is. I think this is with most of us like this, that we like the projects we are currently doing most and we are even more looking forward to the projects that we have applied for. In general, I really like the projects where it has been possible to combine different pieces of knowledge and bring different people together, either directly or indirectly. Ability to dream big. More precisely the ability to dream of the things we could do. Only if there are big goals can big things start happening. Even if the dreams cannot be realized the road may lead to significant discoveries. As I still am a young scientist, in my own mind, I may be immature to completely answer this question. Of course all of my supervisors have influenced me a lot, but even more influence I have had from my students. Their creativity and excitement inspires me and gives me a lot of energy to widen and deepen our expertise and also gives me courage to dive into new areas. To follow your curiosity, to read, to experience, to work hard and to enjoy. About reading, I find it important to also read things that are slightly off from your topic. This can be very inspiring and lead to unexpected chiasmas. However, we should also not forget our families. We can completely focus on our big tasks in science only if we enjoy sufficient support from our family and friends. And definitely we need to reward them for this. There is so much exiting, important and powerful research going on in the mass spec field today. My personal three favourites are: new powerful instrumentation, new fields and automatization of non-target analyses and combining syntheses and analyses in electrospray. Ion mobility and action spectroscopy have added a great value to unambiguously reveal the structure of gas-phase ions analyzed with MS; however, new developments are definitely coming and hopefully will increase our ability to link not only the mass and charge, but also the structure to the analyte even further. These, on the other hand, will significantly reduce the complexity of non-target analyses and could make it a routine technique. In addition to new hardware, we, of course, also need new software, that would lead to a fast interpretation of massive data. In my opinion, this is a high potent intersection of mass spectrometry science and machine learning. In spite of the fact that we tend to think we know how ionization, especially electrospray, works, we still cannot fully describe it. The works of Zare and Cooks groups have shown that there is much more than ionization going on in electrospray droplets. These droplets have shown also great potential as a medium for syntheses. Charged droplets are, therefore, relevant in a much broader spectrum of fields than just mass spectrometry; naturally, mass spectrometry is a primary and valuable tool for studying such droplets. I hope and think that the “simple” mass spectrometry instrumentation will become cheaper and smaller, so that it would be possible to benefit more from the on-site analyses. Additionally, it would make these devices also widely available for medicine, health care and food safety monitoring. This is badly needed all over the world. On the other hand, there are probably a lot of new techniques coming up. We have already seen a revolution in ionization sources that today allow the analysis of almost any compound from almost any sample. I hope that we are now approaching the era of combining mass spectrometry with many other tools that would allow the extraction of more structural information. Sports. I am very much a sports person; I especially enjoy running. Sports also work very well for concentrating the thoughts and ideas. I have had a lot of good scientific ideas while running. I would learn, most probably physics combined with IT. Even though my everyday work also requires gaining new knowledge in these fields, I would appreciate the time to go more into detail and do some systematic learning like back in my undergraduate days. This really is a hard question. I admire many people but it is hard to name one. For me it is very important to see people who have achieved grate fame and economic success, drawing attention to important social and scientific problems. For example, DiCaprio or Kutcher. On the other hand I also like people who show great courage, for example, sportsmen and -women who undertake extreme tasks such as Hawaii Ironman and others. Chemistry ; Ionization ; Electrospray ionization ; Mass spectrometry ; Analytical Chemistry (journal) ; Nanotechnology ; Ion ; Environmental chemistry ; Chromatography ; Organic chemistry Mass Spectrometry Techniques and Applications ; Analytical Chemistry and Chromatography ; Metabolomics and Mass Spectrometry Studies