Table 1.

Three analytical uses of ion mobility

Analytical use of ion mobility	Description	Additional requirements	Example application areas
1. Chemical separation	Partition signal from chemical noise and increase peak capacity of the analysis	None	Detection of illicit compounds (e.g.., drugs and explosives) and screening of exogenous metabolites (e.g., pesticides and industrial chemicals)
2. Analyte identification and characterization	Use CCS measurement to characterize unknown by correlation	Reference values from databases and libraries incorporating normalized drift times, reduced mobilities, and/or CCS	Emerging omics and small molecule discovery initiatives
3. Structural analysis	Utilize the experimental CCS to infer structural information	Computational methods to link theoretical structure(s) to the experimental CCS	Insights into protein complex arrangements and structure