Electron-capture dissociation (ECD) is a method of fragmenting gas-phase ions for structure elucidation of peptides and proteins in tandem mass spectrometry. It is one of the most widely used techniques for activation and dissociation of mass selected precursor ion in MS/MS. It involves the direct introduction of low-energy electrons to trapped gas-phase ions.[1][2]
^Zubarev, Roman A.; Kelleher, Neil L.; McLafferty, Fred W. (1998-04-01). "Electron Capture Dissociation of Multiply Charged Protein Cations. A Nonergodic Process". Journal of the American Chemical Society. 120 (13): 3265–3266. doi:10.1021/ja973478k. ISSN0002-7863.
^McLafferty, Fred W.; Horn, David M.; Breuker, Kathrin; Ge, Ying; Lewis, Mark A.; Cerda, Blas; Zubarev, Roman A.; Carpenter, Barry K. (2001-03-01). "Electron capture dissociation of gaseous multiply charged ions by Fourier-transform ion cyclotron resonance". Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry. 12 (3): 245–249. Bibcode:2001JASMS..12..245M. doi:10.1016/s1044-0305(00)00223-3. ISSN1044-0305. PMID11281599. S2CID45275450.