Are you interested in getting into spatial mass spectrometry but all the super expensive commercial technologies aren't doing it for you?
Why don't you...
What's that? Okay, they didn't invent it for this paper, but they explain it better than I can!
Close enough!
Okay, but analogies aside, we can move tissues at incredibly absurdly high resolutions. Think about the stages they use for electron microscopy! Great imaging mass spec today is like 20 micron. Every vendor will sell you a "5 micron resolution"capable device, but have you ever seen a mass spec imaging ..image...at 5 micron without inflating it with diaper gel? I sure haven't. But EM stages can move in like sub micron easy. The limitations are things like our laser pixels. And when you start talking to people who do anything with piezos (which more the bird beak or capillary), those people are talking about things running at 10-100 kHz (10,000 to 100,000 vibrations/second!) So...I'm totally talking out my nose, but these authors say they're doing 10 and 5 micron and while a healthy truckload of skepticism is always a good idea, this doesn't sound all that far fetched.....
They couple the device to a Waters TOF and then use multiple commercial software solutions from Waters and Shimadzu to convert and extract the data before going to LipidMaps to match the molecules they extracted. (They did lipids for this, I was leaving that part for the end) but why couldn't you pick up a little piezo capillary worth of intact proteins or digested peptides and do the exact same thing? Cool idea, right?
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