Visualizing metabolites at the cellular level: advancements in 3 µm laser desorption mass spectrometry imaging

By combining high beam quality picosecond pulsed optical parametric amplifiers at 2.94 μm with Rapid Evaportive Ionisation Mass Spectrometry (REIMS), we have demonstrated record spatial pixel resolutions for ambient mass spectrometry (MS) imaging of < 10 μm. In this contribution, we introduce our work in this area, demonstrating the platform workflow and highlighting recent results of metabolic imaging at the single cell resolution level.