Measuring the integrity of gas-phase conformers of sodiated 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 by drift tube, travelling wave, trapped, and high-field asymmetric ion mobility.

Quantitation of the serum concentration of 25-hydroxyvitamin D is a high-demand assay that suffers from long chromatography time to separate 25-hydroxyvitamin D from its inactive epimer; however, ion mobility spectrometry can distinguish the epimer pair in under 30 ms due to the presence of a unique extended or "open" gas-phase sodiated conformer, not shared with the epimer, reducing the need for chromatographic separation. Five ion mobility mass spectrometers utilizing commercially available IMS technologies, including drift tube, traveling wave, trapped, and high-field asymmetric ion mobility spectrometry, are evaluated for their ability to resolve the unique open conformer. Additionally, settings for each instrument are evaluated to understand their influence on ion heating, which can drive the open conformer into a compact or "closed" conformer shared with the epimer. The four low-field instruments successfully resolved the open conformer from the closed conformer at baseline or near-baseline resolution at typical operating parameters. High-field asymmetric ion mobility was unable to resolve a unique peak but detected two peaks for the epimer, in contrast to the low-field methods that detected one conformer. This study seeks to expand the instrument space by highlighting the potential of each platform for the separation of 25-hydroxyvitamin D epimers.