Laser Ablation for Analysis of the Composition of Molecules in Tissues
A special issue of International Journal of Molecular Sciences (ISSN 1422-0067). This special issue belongs to the section "Molecular Biophysics".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 July 2021) | Viewed by 8666
Special Issue Editor
Interests: pathobiochemistry; proteoforms; glycomics; lipidomics; metabolomics; proteomics; mass spectrometry; liquid chromatography; biomarker
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Comprehensive analysis of tissues gives information about the structure and function of organisms as well as about their disorders. Pathologists are getting important information about disease states by investigating images of the morphology of tissue sections using light microscopy of stained tissues. Using this approach, information about the chemical composition is minimal. Since the introduction of mass spectrometric imaging (MSI) approximately two decades ago, this gap is getting smaller and smaller. MALDI-MSI is one branch of MSI of tissue sections. MALDI-MSI can be interpreted as a special form of laser ablation, delivering information about the distribution of abundances of molecules in tissues. Laser ablation has also been combined with electrospray ionization (LAESI) for tissue analysis. A more direct form of laser ablation giving access to the distribution of elements in tissues is MSI performed with inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). With ICP-MS in combination with antibodies labeled with metal ions (e.g. metal-coded affinity tags (MECAT)), even a targeted analysis of the distribution of defined proteins is possible. For untargeted analysis of “omes”, such as proteomes in tissues, laborious and time-consuming procedures, such as laser capture microdissection (LCM), have been used in recent years. Laser ablation as a tool for the sampling of tissues for the analysis of omes, requiring several sample preparation steps prior to MS, was introduced within this decade, e.g., by Isabelle Fournier, Marcel Kwiatkowski, or Kermit Murray, and is now a promising alternative for LCM. The picosecond infrared laser (PIRL), developed by Dwayne Miller, is also promising.
In summary, laser ablation either directly coupled with MS or for sampling has become an important tool in biochemistry and medicine.
The scope of this Special Issue is to highlight the theoretical background and report new results, current developments, and applications of methods that apply different forms of laser ablation for tissue analysis as described above. Reviews are also welcome.
Prof. Dr. Hartmut Schlüter
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS)
- laser ablation electrospray ionization (LAESI)
- mass spectrometric imaging (MSI)
- MALDI-MSI
- metal-coded affinity tags (MECAT)
- picosecond infrared laser (PIRL)
- tissue section
- tissue sampling
- glycomics
- lipidomics
- metabolomics
- proteomics
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