Mass spectrometry as a tool in dendrimer chemistry: from self-assembling dendrimers to dendrimer gas-phase host-guest chemistry

Mass spectrometry has played a significant role in dendrimer chemistry, because it serves as an excellent analytical means to determine the purity and analyze the nature of defects even for higher generations. However, a mass spectrometer can also be used as a laboratory to study isolated dendrimer molecules in the gas phase or their host-guest complexes. Since the properties of molecules under environment-free conditions are often quite different from those in solution, their gas-phase chemistry provides valuable new insight into properties which cannot easily be studied in solution. This article summarizes some of our work on characterizing self-assembling metallo-supramolecular dendrimers, on analyzing ionization artifacts, on the differentiation between several, sometimes even isomeric defects through tandem MS experiments, and finally on the analysis of a surprisingly clear dendritic effect occurring in the fragmentation of dendritic host-guest complexes. Copyright (c) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.