Collisional Activation of Large Molecules Is an Efficient Process

It is a common perception that as molecules become larger they become inherently more difficult to activate and dissociate in the gas phase, especially under low energy collision induced dissociation (CID) conditions. This difficulty has been attributed both to the inefficiency of the collisional activation process and to the requirement of higher levels of internal excitation to induce dissociation. A serious consequence of this supposition is the implied difficulty of using CID methods to sequence peptides and proteins.