Abstract:

Mass spectrometry professionals are in short supply industry-wide. Undergraduate teaching has bottlenecks： limited instrumentation， weak qualitative skills and abstract theoretical concepts. We report an innovative pedagogy coupling conventional gas chromatography-mass spectrometry （GC-MS） with the MassWorks^TM software suite. A 14-component fragrance standard mixture was employed to design an experiment spanning the entire workflow separation， detection， exact-mass measurement， isotopic-pattern matching， molecular-formula assignment， structural elucidation. By exploiting the software’s dual-calibration algorithms for exact-mass and isotopic-profile refinement， the mass accuracy and qualitative reliability of GC-low resolution MS data were dramatically enhanced. The practical results show that this method improves the quality accuracy of MS data by 100 times， controls the mass deviation within |Δm|≤10 mDa， achieves an accuracy of over 98% in isotope spectra， and provides accurate and reliable qualitative results. The teaching effect is significant. Through the closed-loop training of theoretical analysis， software application， and practical verification， students’ scientific research thinking， data analysis ability， and innovative ability to solve complex problems have been effectively improved. This provides a replicable and scalable effective paradigm for improving the quality of instrument analysis teaching under limited resource conditions.

Key words: MassWorks, gas chromatography-low resolution mass spectrometry, teaching reform, molecular formula identification, accuracy of isotopic spectrum