Mass spectrometry imaging technological developments

To date, the comprehensive measurement of all species in a single live cell over time remains a vision. Nevertheless, conceptual and technical developments in the last decade have enabled progress in two complementary directions. On the one hand, parallel analyses of thousands of species are possible thanks to mass spectrometry and microarrays. Yet, these technologies have the drawbacks that cells have to be disrupted to extract the analytes, and single-cell analyses are still limited by insufficient sensitivity or unspecific interactions, respectively. On the other hand, real-time imaging techniques deliver precise measurements at a single molecule level over time and with high spatial resolution, but are limited to the observations of only a few species at the time (mostly proteins). In both cases, we expect the bottlenecks to be (partially) relieved in the future. 

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