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M. Bonta, B. Hegedus, A. Limbeck:
"Expanding the possibilities of elemental analysis: Investigations of biological tissues using Tandem LA/LIBS";
Talk: Metallomics 2015, Beijing, China; 09-09-2015 - 09-12-2015; in: "Book of Abstracts", (2015), 1 pages.

Tissue analysis using LA-ICP-MS is a powerful tool to depict the lateral resolution of trace elements within biological samples. However, this method is restricted, as especially some biologically relevant bulk elements, such as oxygen, nitrogen, or hydrogen, are not accessible for analysis. Laser induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS), however, is capable of detecting those elements, and can thus help to tackle the limits of LA-ICP-MS. Compared to conventional LA-ICPMS, Tandem LA/LIBS analysis of biological samples can expand the range of accessible elements giving the opportunity of gaining even more information from one sample analysis. This will make the obtained results even more reliable and can increase the significance for biological and medical interpretations. In this work, Tandem LA/LIBS has been utilized for the determination of bulk as well as trace elements in thin slices of human tumor samples after treatment of the patients with cisplatin as anti-cancer drug. LIBS as a simultaneous multi-elemental technique was used to depict the distributions of higher abundant elements in the samples (including the bulk elements such as C, H, N, O), while LA-ICP-MS was employed for investigations on trace elements with limits of detection below the μg/g-range. It has been shown that the application of Tandem LA/LIBS in elemental bio-imaging can benefit substantially from the increased elemental coverage.

LA-ICP-MS, LIBS, imaging, elemental analysis, tissue analysis