Development of "super-resolution" cryogenic chemical imaging

To understand how metabolites and drugs function in our bodies, it is essential to map their distributions accurately within tissues and cells. Secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) is emerging as a powerful technology for this.

We and others have collaborated with industry to improve SIMS instruments so that it is now possible to image tissues at micron spatial resolution with high mass resolution (>240,000 at m/z 200) and <2 ppm mass accuracy. OrbiSIMS is a hybrid SIMS instrument that we developed, which was recently commercialised.

Last year, we published the first cryogenic workflows for OrbiSIMS, increasing its chemical coverage and improving in situ detection sensitivity by at least an order of magnitude.

We now propose three technology development aims with the goal of removing critical remaining obstacles to the wide adoption of SIMS in the biomedical sciences and pharmaceutical industry: 1) To optimise instrumentation and sample preparation for submicron-resolution cryo-OrbiSIMS. 2) To develop a toolkit of cryo-OrbiSIMS-visible chemical and genetically-encoded markers for cells and organelles. 3) To validate the OrbiSIMS marker toolkit across another SIMS platform - NanoSIMS.