Abstract

The building block of life, single cells, now have another techniques available for their investigation and quantification of resident compounds through the advent of mass spectrometry. Advances in miniaturization of fluidic systems and pairing of separation methods allow for lower limits on sample volume then previously achieved. An emerging field of Single Cell Mass Spectrometry (SCMS) has advanced in recent years providing high sensitivity and selectivity that is required for measurements of nanoliter volumes. The interest in SCMS stems from the desire to determine cell heterogeneity by metabolite fingerprinting, an impractical task by most other methods using cell populations. Better understanding on how cells differ is expected to have scientific significance from applications in medicinal research to single cell temporal metabolomics. Different approaches will be presented that use a variation of instrumentation, separation, ionization, and mass analysis depending on the research goal.

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