Abstract: It is widely accepted that the most significant motif for the fast growing field of tandem mass spectrometry was to respond to the requirements of biochemistry, molecular biology, medical and medicinal chemistry. Reversely, the fast development of genomic research during the previous decade, the continuous expansion of proteomics and of metabolomics, as well as the recent interest in metallomics are mainly due to the capabilities offered by modern mass spectrometric instrumentation. The presentation will be focused mainly to the performance of some modern tandem mass spectrometric concepts, as introduced from several manufacturers, although the list is quite large and not all of them can be presented. There are many instruments commercially available for this purpose, capable for direct or hyphenated mass spectrometric analysis in one step (MS). However the demand for structure elucidation of extremely complicated unknown compounds, like proteins and peptides, nucleic acids, carbohydrates and their complexes, and many other types of biomolecules, forced the research to move to the second step, i.e. the development of much more sophisticated spectrometers combining two or three analyzers successively, the so called tandem mass spectrometers. These are capable to provide multi-stage mass spectrometric analysis (MSn), which means selection of precursor ions and further fragmentation of them to produce daughter ions, enabling thus the characterization of the above matrices. In a third step, since there are still many cases with confusion among several possible chemical structures, especially in the field of biochemistry, high-resolution tandem mass instruments (HRMS) were further developed and the current commercial competition shifts the research to even higher standards.

Brief Biography of the Speaker:
Dr George Zachariadis is an Associate Professor of Analytical Chemistry at the Department of Chemistry of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in Macedonia, Greece. He teaches quantitative analytical chemistry and instrumental analysis to undergraduate and postgraduate students during the past fifteen years. He was the author or co-author of 6 books of Analytical Chemistry and of almost 90 scientific papers and 2 reviews in the field of development, optimization and evaluation of modern instrumental analysis techniques. He has actively participated in almost 25 international conferences with more than 90 announcements. He is reviewer in 15 scientific journals of Analytical, Environmental and Food Chemistry. His main research activities are focused on Atomic and Mass Spectrometric techniques for the determination of heavy metals, trace elements of special interest, because inorganic substances even in very low concentrations play extremely important role in biological systems and also in the environment. He has developed methods also for the analysis of biological materials and determination of organic molecules of biological and medical interest by gas or liquid chromatographic techniques coupled to mass spectrometry. His research is focused on Multi-elemental and Speciation methods. He has also special research activities in Chemometric approaches for Archaeometric and Bioanalytical applications, as well as Food and Drug analysis, with almost a thousand of citations in his published work.