中文摘要：

疏水作用是决定生物分子的结构和性质的重要因素，特别是在蛋白质的折叠，药物分子与受体（蛋白质、DNA等）的相互作用中起着关键作用．分子疏水性的强弱决定于分子内非极性基团的含量．在一定的实验条件下，电喷雾所获得的信号与多肽分子内非极性基团的面积呈现良好的相关性．因此，采用电喷雾飞行时间质谱法，在数分钟之内快速测定了不同多肽之间的疏水性，所获得结果与色谱法结果一致．

英文摘要：

Hydrophobicity is the association of non-polar groups or molecules in an aqueous environment which arises from the tendency of water to exclude non-polar molecules. Hydrophobic interaction is one of the most important non-bonded interactions which determine protein folding and ligand-receptor binding. To date, hydrophobicity usually has to be evaluated by means of calculation of LogP, because it is a tedious procedure to experimentally measure the hydrophobicity of molecules using techniques reported previously. As a matter of fact, the nature of hydrophobicity in chemistry refers to the physical property of a molecule that is repelled by water, which is clearly associated with the non-polar area in the molecules. The later can be correlated to signal intensity of the molecules in electrospray ionization mass spectrometry. Various dilute water solutions of tripeptides with increasing non-polar area were investigated in ESI time-of-flight mass spectrometry, and the ESI response of the tripeptides was linearly correlated to the non-polar areas in the molecules. Therefore, the hydrophobicity of peptides can be measured quantitatively in terms of ESI signal intensity. Thus hydrophobicity of the peptides was experimentally measured within a few minutes, and data showed a good agreement with previous results obtained in high performance liquid chromatography.