Justin M. Wiseman, Demian R. Ifa, Qingyu Song, R. Graham Cooks
Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2006, 45 (43), pp. 7188-7192
Mass spectrometry (MS) is an increasingly indispensable tool in the biological sciences. Innovations in methods of creating, analyzing (mass), dissociating, reacting, and collecting ions are allowing the identification of increasingly complex biomolecules and molecular complexes, and some of these innovations hold the promise of implementation in a clinical setting. We report on one such new development, imaging of biological tissue sections at atmospheric pressure without prior chemical treatment of the tissue. The experiment uses a new mass spectrometry technique, desorption electrospray ionization (DESI), introduced as one of a family of methods that have extended the applications of mass spectrometry to ordinary samples in the ambient environment. The DESI methodology is demonstrated here to allow mapping of the distribution of specific lipids directly from thin histological sections of rat brain with spatial resolution of less than 500 um and with unit-mass resolution.
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