A molecular imaging approach combining Raman Spectroscopy and Mass Spectrometry to study biological samples

The study of biological samples, like biological tissues or microbial communities, can be very complicated as such kind of samples are in essence extremely complex. This complexity is mainly expressed by the heterogeneity of their molecular microstructure, both in terms of spatial arrangement and chemical composition. Thus, the analysis of biological samples requires analytical techniques able to visualise the distribution of the chemical compounds within the sample at a molecular level and with a high spatial resolution. To this end, the use of molecular imaging techniques is a promising avenue and, in particular, the development of multimodal approaches (that is, combining several complementary techniques to overcome the limitations of the individual ones) has grown interest in the last decade. Here, we show that the combination of Raman spectroscopy and mass spectrometry imaging represents an up-and-coming implementation of multimodal molecular imaging for the study of complex biological samples.