A brief review on mass/optical spectrometry for imaging analysis of biological samples

Abstract

Imaging analysis, especially bioimaging analysis, has been a hot research topic in recent years. There are numerous imaging analysis techniques for diverse applications of a wide spectrum of samples, with their unique advantages and disadvantages, and there are several related reviews published yearly. Among them, imaging mass spectrometry (IMS) is a relatively novel analytical technique for studying the distribution of molecular or ionic species at the level of tissue, cell, or subcellular, with its main feature of combining mass spectra for molecular identification and image visualization for quick and convenient analysis. The IMS does not require chemical labeling or complex sample preparation. This review, therefore, mainly focuses on the popular emerging IMS technique, including related ionization techniques in connection with their IMS applications, and some unique optical imaging techniques such as chemiluminescence imaging and dual-modal bioimaging for biological sample analysis, with 105 related recent references.

Keywords:

• Imaging analysis
• bioimaging analysis
• mass spectrometry
• optical spectrometry
• chemiluminescence
• multimodal bioimaging
• dual-modal bioimaging
• biomedical imaging
• laser
• ionization source

Disclosure statement

There are no conflicts to declare.

Additional information

Funding

The authors are grateful with the financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 21427810) and Ministry of Education through the 111 Project (B17030) for financial supports of our research.