Ms Sylwia Ptasinska

 

Employed as a Pre Doc. University of Innsbruck, Austria (UIBK)
Start Date: January 2003, End Date: August/September 2005

In 2001 I was graduated as a Master of Science in Physics at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University of Lublin in Poland. The title of my master thesis is “Mass spectrometry of gaseous clusters”, for which I have gotten the awards of Polish Vacuum Society for the best thesis of year. After my study I was during one year PhD student at the same university, where I continued the studies of small protonated clusters obtained from ammonia and water. I also started new topic of researches, where I used MALDI (Matrix Assisted Laser Desorption/Ionization) method for study of big biomolecules like hemoglobin, insulin and cytochrome. Since October in 2002 I have started PhD study in Institute of Ion Physics at the Innsbruck University and I have been employed there like an EPIC young researcher in Prof. Tilmann D. Märk’s group. The topic of my present studies is inelastic electron interaction (attachment/ionization) with biomolecule (particularly DNA and RNA components, but also amino acids and sugars) in the gas phase. For my studies I use high resolution crossed beams machine, consisting of hemispherical electron monochromator in combination with quadrupole mass spectrometer. From these measurements we can determinate the ionization energies, cross section and also production and decay mechanisms of parent and fragment cations and anions. Also from results obtained from partially deuterated thymine it is observed that deuterium abstracted from the carbon site can be the initial step toward strands breaks in DNA. Last time I got opportunity to involve to Prof. E. Illenberger’s group (which is also the team of the EPIC network), where I studied electron attachment to clusters of propanionic acid.