Electrospray-Orbitrap Analysis of Nitrate and Sulfate Isotopologues in Natural Samples: Performance and Constraints
Jack Saville, Julien Witwicky, Elsa Gautier, Alexis Lamothe, Nils Johannes Kuhlbusch, Becky Alexander, Andrew Schauer, Andrea Burke, Priyesh Prabhat, Eva Stüeken, Joshua Garber, Nicolas Caillon, Joël Savarino · 2026
Read Electrospray-Orbitrap Analysis of Nitrate and Sulfate Isotopologues in Natural Samples: Performance and Constraints by Jack Saville, Julien Witwicky, Elsa Gautier, Alexis Lamothe, Nils Johannes Kuhlbusch, Becky Alexander, Andrew Schauer, Andrea Burke, Priyesh Prabhat, Eva Stüeken, Joshua Garber, Nicolas Caillon, Joël Savarino (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13584694.txt.
Description
Jack Saville and twelve co-authors set out how to run a new kind of isotope measurement on real-world samples without fooling yourself, in this 2026 study. The method sprays dissolved nitrate or sulfate into a high-resolution Orbitrap instrument and reads whole molecules, keeping isotope patterns that older machines destroy. It needs only tens of nanomoles of sample.
On natural samples the team found sharp sensitivities: stray contaminants a thousand times weaker than the target still bent results, and readings drifted with room temperature over half an hour. Their recipe answers with hard purification, constant sample-standard bracketing, and careful calibration. With those guards, precision matched classic methods, and ice-core samples yielded clumped-isotope readings.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Jack Saville, Julien Witwicky, Elsa Gautier, Alexis Lamothe, Nils Johannes Kuhlbusch, Becky Alexander, Andrew Schauer, Andrea Burke, Priyesh Prabhat, Eva Stüeken, Joshua Garber, Nicolas Caillon, Joël Savarino |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 67 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |