Lipid imaging with cluster time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry.

This brief article provides an overview of the current state of the art in biological imaging mass spectrometry using cluster time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry (TOF-SIMS). Recent and spectacular improvements in terms of sensitivity of TOF-SIMS imaging methods have allowed many biological applications to recently be successfully tested, such as mapping of lipid disorders in human muscles of a patient suffering from dystrophy, localization of surfactins after the swarming of bacteria on a surface, or lipid mapping over whole-body animal sections.