Revealing data encrypted in sequence-controlled poly(alkoxyamine phosphodiester)s by combining ion mobility with tandem mass spectrometry.

The defined sequence of two comonomers in sequence-controlled macromolecules can be used to store binary information which is further decoded by MS/MS sequencing. In order to achieve the full sequence coverage requested for reliable decoding, the structure of these polymers can be optimized to minimize their dissociation extent, as shown for poly(alkoxyamine phosphodiester)s (PAPs) where weak alkoxyamine bonds were introduced in each repeating unit to make all phosphate groups MS/MS silent. However, for secret communications, a too high MS/MS readability could be a drawback. In this context, the design of PAPs was further optimized in this work to also include a decrypting key based on slight variation of a fragment collision cross section. This was achieved by employing two different nitroxides to build the alkoxyamine moiety, each containing a coding alkyl segment of the same mass but different architectures. As a result, the digital sequence determined from primary fragments observed in MS/MS had to be decrypted according to appropriate rules that depend on the drift times measured by ion mobility spectrometry for repeating units released as secondary product ions.