Elemental and molecular imaging of tissue

Full text: Whether proteins and trace elements are homogeneously distributed throughout a certain tissue type was until recently not possible to estimate because bulk-analysis does not give spatial resolution. The advent of molecular and elemental imaging utilizing laser-ablation and matrix assisted desorption now gives access to this kind of spatial information. Imaging of neighbouring tissue thin sections by laser-ablation ICPMS and MALDI-TOFMS can give information about both elemental distribution and the associated proteins. The presentation shows the optimization of these techniques for the complementary mapping of proteins and trace elements in thin sections of tissues, and their applications. (author)