Get 10-fold higher mass spec imaging resolution by inflating your sample!

 

As cool as mass spectrometry imaging is, microscope people are quick to point out that 5um resolution (which takes a long time to do and is often the upper limit for even the nicest mass specs) is crappy for a microscope.

There is obviously lots of work in this area, but wouldn't it be easier to just make the sample itself a lot bigger? 

No, you don't need some Pimm particles or whatever  

(by far, my favorite Ant Man scene in any movie)

This might sound like a joke, but sample expansion is absolutely used in microscopy. It was a pretty big deal when it was first done about a decade ago and people still do it. You uniformly add polymer to your sample and that sample uniformly expands, then you look at that. Or something. Obviously not my expertise. 

So why didn't we just do this before? Well, polymers and mass spectrometers aren't always the best of friends. You need to find something that causes expansion AND is mass spec compatible and this team seems to have done that here. Super cool backward approach to getting absurd mass spec resolution!