AVS 53rd International Symposium
    Applied Surface Science Wednesday Sessions
       Session AS+BI-WeA

Paper AS+BI-WeA3
Acquisition of Chemical Information from Cell Samples Using TOF-SIMS Imaging

Wednesday, November 15, 2006, 2:40 pm, Room 2005

Session: Imaging and Characterization of Biological Materials
Presenter: B. Hagenhoff, TASCON GmbH, Germany
Authors: D. Breitenstein, TASCON GmbH, Germany
C. Rommel, University of Münster, Germany
J. Wegener, University of Münster, Germany
R. Moellers, IONTOF GmbH, Germany
E. Niehuis, IONTOF GmbH, Germany
B. Hagenhoff, TASCON GmbH, Germany
Correspondent: Click to Email
Our ongoing studies focus on the mass spectrometric imaging for cells, an emerging area in TOF-SIMS research. In a joint research effort we want to elucidate the transport mechanism for drugs through the blood-liquor barrier. Being a vacuum technique TOF-SIMS faces some challenges for the analysis of epithelial cells. A standard approach to maintain the cellular integrity of cells during the experiments is freeze fracturing or cryomicrotomy. However, these techniques increase the experimental effort significantly. As we were not interested in the lateral distribution of elemental species like Na of K but small and middle sized molecules we concentrated on different fixation techniques instead. Mainly, paraformaldehyd and glutardialdehyd were used. In order to visualize the three-dimensional molecular structure of the cells C@sub 60@ sputtering was combined with imaging using Bi@sub 3@ primary ions. In order to compare the results with a standard analytical technique in biochemistry, additionally cells were treated with fluorescent dyes. The intact fluorophores could be detected successfully in the TOF-SIMS images. The obtained mass resolved images for the fluorescent dyes were compared successfully with the widely accepted technique of confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM), proving the validity of the chosen mass spectrometric approach. This work was supported by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (Grand: 0312002B).