This article provides an overview of the chemistry of synthetic dyes needed for the understanding of mass spectrometry (MS) sample preparation and spectral results, current fields of application, ionization methods, and fragmentation trends and works that have been reported in recent years.
Synthetic dyes are found in a wide variety of applications today, including but not limited to textiles, foods, and medicine. The analysis of these molecules is pertinent to several fields such as forensics, environmental monitoring, and quality control, all of which require the sensitivity and selectivity of analysis provided by mass spectrometry (MS). Recently, there has been an increase in the implementation of MS evaluation of synthetic dyes by various methods, with the majority of research thus far falling under electrospray ionization and moving toward direct ionization methods. (Publisher abstract provided)