Investigation of the spatial distribution of lipids in cell membranes can lead to an improved understanding of the role of lipids in biological function and disease. Time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry is capable of molecule-specific imaging of biological molecules across single cells and has demonstrated potential for examining the functional segregation of lipids in cell membranes. In this paper, standard SIMS spectra are analyzed for phosphatidylethanolamine, phosphatidylglycerol, phosphatidylserine, phosphatidylinositol, cholesterol, and sulfatide. Importantly, each of the lipids result in signature mass spectral peaks that allow them to be identified. These signature peaks are also useful for imaging experiments and are utilized here to simultaneously image lipids on a micrometer scale in picoliter vials. Because the low secondary ion signal achieved for lipids from an atomic primary ion source makes cell-imaging experiments challenging, improving signal with cluster primary ion sources is of interest. Here, we compare the secondary ion yield for seven lipids using atomic (Ga+ or In+) ion sources and a buckminsterfullerene (C60+) primary ion source. A 40-1000-fold improvement in signal is found with C60+ relative to the other two ion sources, indicating great promise for future cellular imaging applications using the C60+ probe.

We employ a newly developed buckminsterfullerene (C(60)) primary ion beam with time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry to create molecule-specific images of resin particles employed in the solid-phase synthesis of peptide combinatorial libraries. This new cluster ion source, when operated at an incident energy of 20 keV, is remarkably effective at desorbing small peptides directly from a polymer surface and opens new possibilities for characterizing large arrays of diverse sets of molecules. In addition, the C(60) ion beam may be focused to a spot of 1.5 microm in diameter, enabling molecule-specific images of single 100 microm resin particles to be acquired. We report three significant aspects associated with utilizing the C(60) projectile that show how this technology can be taken to a more advanced level, especially when compared to results obtained with more conventional atomic primary ions. First, the useful yield of molecular ions is generally observed to be enhanced by at least 3 orders of magnitude over those previously possible. Second, the energy dissipation process associated with the C(60) impact is most efficient at desorbing molecules on soft substrates such as polymer surfaces rather than harder substrates such as metals or semiconductors. Third, there is a greatly reduced tendency for insulating surfaces to build up excess charge, obviating the need for charge compensation. Using a small five-member peptide library as a model, we show that by utilizing the focusing properties of the C(60) beam, it is possible to assay the surface composition of 100-microm polymer beads at a rate of up to 10 particles/s. Moreover, even at the picomole level, there are enough sequence ions in the mass spectrum to determine a unique composition. The results illustrate the ability to quickly assay large libraries without the use of tags and suggest the strategy may be applicable to a range of high-throughput experiments.

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