Research facilities Biomolecular Imaging Mass Spectrometry
The high resolution mass spectrometric facility at AMOLF provides a unique, state-of-the-art infrastructure for atomic and molecular imaging of surfaces.
Complementary molecular imaging instruments allow the determination of the spatial distribution of intact, unlabeled biomolecules from cellular and tissue surfaces with spatial resolutions ranging from 200 nm to 200 micrometer.
Equipment
The facility is equipped with a variety of sample handling and automated preparation tools that allow the usage of controlled and reproducible protocols. The different desorption and ionization methods available allow the analysis of a variety of complex surfaces, such as semiconductors, paint and coatings, polymers, single cells and histological tissue sections. In addition various proteomics technologies are used to investigate the structure-function relation of biomolecules in their native environment.
The mass spectrometry based molecular tissue imaging facility at AMOLF is equipped with:
- A 9.4T MALDI/ESI Fourier Transform Ion Cyclotron Resonance imaging mass spectrometer
- A 7T LTQ-FTICR system for atmospheric ionisation and imaging
- A Bruker Ultraflex III ToF/ToF MALDI molecular imager
- A Physical Electronics TRIFT II high resolution secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) ToF-MS system
- The TRIFT II based AMOLF mass microscope for direct ion imaging with MALDI and SIMS
- A Waters MALDI Synapt HDMS system for conformational molecular imaging.
- A fully equipped sample preparation facility, including cryosectioning, staining, analytical microscopes, matrix deposition and coating devices.
- Nano-HPLC systems
- Spotting robot for LC-MALDI
- Virtual laboratory based image processing and analysis tools, including tissue classification and correlation software and protein data basing tools
- Large scale data storage and cluster computing facilities.
External user's contact: Prof.dr. Ron M.A. Heeren
