A molecular model to explain paclitaxel and docetaxel sensitivity changes through adduct formation with primary amines in electrospray ionization mass spectrometry.

The objective of this study was to adopt a molecular modeling approach to understand changes in signal intensity due to adduct formation with short-chain alkylamines for two anticancer agents, paclitaxel and docetaxel, during electrospray mass spectrometric analysis. We describe a simple and intuitive modeling procedure using a comparison of hydropathic interaction (HINT) scores to explain differences in responses of amine adducts formed with the two analytes. The responses of paclitaxel and docetaxel were generally enhanced considerably (up to approximately 500% in some instances) on adding the amines. However, for the docetaxel adduct formed with added decylamine in the mobile phase, the response dropped by 32%. A mechanistic understanding for this behavior is proposed, and binding scores calculated from corresponding molecular models were found to be consistent with the trend obtained from mass spectrometric data. Copyright 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.