| AVS 62nd International Symposium & Exhibition | |
| Applied Surface Science | Wednesday Sessions |
| Session AS-WeM |
| Session: | Practical Surface Analysis II: Influence of Sample Preparation and Novel Sample Prep Techniques |
| Presenter: | John Fletcher, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden |
| Correspondent: | Click to Email |
Biological and medical research is a popular and expanding area of application for time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry (ToF-SIMS). The ability to perform such analyses has greatly benefited in recent years from the introduction of new ion beams that generate more signal from intact molecular ions that are generally more chemically characteristic and so aid in the interpretation of the complex spectra generated from biological specimen. The introduction of polyatomic ion beams such as C60 heralded the dawn 3D molecular imaging with ToF-SIMS and most recently gas cluster ion beams such as Ar4000 have shown dramatic improvements for the detection of intact lipid species from tissue.
However, such advances are meaningless if the information from the analysis is erroneous due to artefacts introduced during the preparation of chemically complex, and delicate, biological samples such as cells and tissue sections. Analysis of samples in a frozen hydrated state is often considered to be the best approach for maintaining the integrity of the sample but is not always possible or practical. In this presentation the implications of different preparation approaches are presented and discussed and methods for removing artefacts due to imperfect sample preparation are presented.