Atmospheric Pressure Mass Spectrometry Imaging Using Laser Ablation, Followed by Dielectric Barrier Discharge Ionization

Mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) has become a powerful tool in diverse fields, for example, life science, biomaterials, and catalysis, for its ability of in situ and real-time visualization of the location of chemical compounds in samples. Although laser ablation (LA) achieves high spatial resolution in MSI, the ion yield can be very low. We therefore combined an LA system with an ambient ion source for post-ionization and an atmospheric pressure (AP) inlet mass spectrometer to construct a novel AP-MSI platform. A dielectric barrier discharge ionization (DBDI) source is operated in the “active sampling capillary” configuration, can be coupled to any mass spectrometer with an AP interface, and possesses high ion transmission efficiency. This study presents some application examples based on LA-DBDI, a low-cost and flexible strategy for AP-MSI, which does not require any sample pretreatment, and we show MS imaging of endogenous species in a traditional Chinese herbal medicine and of a drug molecule in zebra fish tissue, with a lateral resolution of ≈20 μm.