Highly Efficient Compositional and Compound Specific Isotopic Analysis of Volatile Primary Amines and Ammonia in the Murchison Meteorite Using SPME On-Fiber Derivatization: Optimization for Bennu Sample Analyses.

Rationale: Extraterrestrial amines and ammonia are critical ingredients for the formation of astrobiologically important compounds such as amino acids and nucleobases. However, conventional methods for analyzing the composition and isotopic ratios of volatile amines suffer from lengthy derivatization and purification procedures, high sample mass consumption, and chromatographic interferences from derivatization reagents and non-target compounds.

Methods: Here we demonstrate a highly efficient method to analyze the composition and compound specific isotopic ratios of C to C amines as well as ammonia based on solid phase micro-extraction (SPME) on-fiber derivatization.