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Don’t use an ionizer air purifier in your clean air space because it can create ozone.

He and his collaborators have taken a big step in that direction by 3D printing a low-cost ionizer -- a critical component of all mass spectrometers -- that performs twice as well as its state-of-the-art counterparts.

"This is a do-it-yourself approach to making an ionizer, but it is not a contraption held together with duct tape or a poor man's version of the device. At the end of the day, it works better than devices made using expensive processes and specialized instruments, and anyone can be empowered to make it," says Velásquez-García, senior author of a paper on the ionizer.

Since molecules in blood don't have an electric charge, an ionizer is used to give them a charge before they are analyzed.

The MIT researchers used 3D printing, along with some clever optimizations, to produce a low-cost electrospray emitter that outperformed state-of-the-art mass spectrometry ionizer versions.