Imaging mass spectrometry of thin tissue sections: A decade of collective efforts

Imaging mass spectrometry (MS) allows to monitor the spatial distribution and abundance of endogenous and administered compounds present within tissue specimens. Several different but complementary imaging MS technologies have been developed allowing the analysis of a wide variety of compounds including inorganic elementals, metabolites, lipids, peptides, proteins and xenobiotics with spatial resolutions from micrometer to nanometer scales. In the past decade, an enormous collective body of work has been done to develop and improve the imaging MS technology. This article gives a historical perspective, an overview of the principle and status of the technology and lists the main fields of applications. It also enumerates some of the critical challenges we need to collectively address for imaging MS to be considered a mainstream analytical method.This article is part of a Special Issue entitled: Imaging Mass Spectrometry: A User’s Guide to a New Technique for Biological and Biomedical Research.

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► Imaging mass spectrometry allows to map biomolecules through the direct analysis of thin tissue sections in perfect correlation with histology.
► Elementals, biomolecules including peptides, proteins, lipids and metabolites as well as xenobiotics can be detected and imaged.
► The molecular patterns and images recovered are histology specific.