MASP -- What if we think about mass spec imaging sideways?

I saw this at US HUPO and I'm thrilled that it is out. It is the sort of sideways innovative thinking that comes out of Jun Qu's lab and it's worth thinking about.

I gotta catch up on piles of work from being away, but here is the paper from long ago 2022. 

I think I've seen some robotics stuff from PNNL recently that was similar, but what MASP is doing is generating amazingly small matrices and then physically isolating slices of biological material.

Now they can take the little cuts from each scaffold, do in-depth proteomics and reassemble the pieces. How little? Well, they're cutting pieces smaller than what our MALDI-Orbitrap can resolve WITH. A. LASER. No joke, they're cutting little boxes at less than 100 um in size.

Crazy? Sort of, but you have to think outside the box if you want to get spatial proteomics. 

We haven't really tried hard to push MALDI-MS proteomics but a postdoc here who worked with it for a while would get the top 100 or 200 proteins as he worked across a tissue. 

MASP is getting 5,000 proteins!