I work on quantitative analysis of drugs and metabolites in plasma by LC-MS/MS. I know nothing about IC but I am really curious if I could take advantage of IC for that type of work. Plaese advise.

In general the ionic salts don't work well with the MS. You're pretty much limited to ammonium (cationic salt) and either acetate/formate as the anionic salts. I've seen a few paper on it (J Nicholson, UK), but its not very popular. If you really want to do it, you need to use an ion suppressor. You may try CE-MS, but the coupling is tedious. I'm curious as to why you want to go to IC?

From Anonymous 9:38 am:

We usually use SPE for sample prep and RP or HILIC for LC for that type of work. I asked the question just because I would like to expand our technical capacity or do our current job better. Can you (2. anonymous) do me a favour and give me a few publications (Journal name, volume and page etc.)? I am really curious if ion supression technique and ic could benefit to our work (reduce ionization suppression, reduce run time and increase sensitivity/selectivity).

We haven't got CE yet. I am not interested in CE-MS at this moment.

Regards and thanks!

Substantial improvement of detection limits are typically is achieved when replacing "volatile buffers" with a suppressor based methodology. I seen several rather convincing demonstrations of this. A common misconception is that when using volatile buffers, the adverse effect of electrolytes in MS is avoided. The reality is that the use of volatile buffers only minimizes the problem and in some cases 10-100 improvements in sensitivity are achieved by completely removing background electrolytes with a suppressor. There are a couple of references regarding this technique at the Dionex Web site (http://www.dionex.com/servletwl1/FileDownloader/slot114/285087/AN151_031103.pdf and http://www.dionex.com/app/tree.taf?asset_id=278316). If you would like more information you can e-mail me.