IMAGING MS

MALDI MS Imaging began in 1994, when first images of peptides were acquired from standard preparations and images were created by dedicated software with sub-micrometer resolution on the LAMMA2000 instrument (ref). Soon after, people began to acquire mass spectra point-by-point using commercial instruments and assembling the data by hand into an excel table. Since then, we worked on tools to automate this process by writing software to control commercial instruments. Five versions have been written and applied in biomedical research since. During this process, we were often contacted by outside parties for access to this software tools. In the past, we did not have a mechanism to efficiently distribute and support the software and therefore only a small group of collaborators had access to our tools.