Abstract

The SEISMIC facility is a new BBSRC national facility that is advancing single cell and sub-cellular measurements. We use capillary sampling to sample live cells or sub-cellular compartments under microscope observation, and measure them using mass spectrometry. We will also show how lipid and metabolite profiles of single cancer cells respond to drug, infection and radiation treatment [1-5]. We will present new work showing sub-cellular metallomics and proteomics. Finally, the talk will describe a new approach to multimodal imaging using both keV and MeV ion beams, providing the opportunity to co-localise metals with biomolecules at sub-cellular spatial resolution.

Bio

Melanie Bailey is Professor of Physical Sciences of Life at Kings College London and Professor of Analytical Science at the University of Surrey. She is Director of SEISMIC , a new BBSRC national facility for spatially resolved single and sub-cellular “omics” and is Principal Investigator for an EPSRC funded project to bring new instrumentation for multimodal imaging at the UK National Ion Beam Centre for correlative imaging of metals and other omics markers. She is a member of the international advisory board for the Ion Beam Analysis conference series, International Nuclear Microprobe conference series and the Bragg Institute. She is a Trustee of the Analytical Chemistry Trust Fund and recently obtained a Guiness World Record as “Fastest Marathon Dressed as a Cell” to raise awareness and funding for analytical science. She is Editor in Chief of the Royal Society of Chemistry’s longest running journal “Analyst”.

[1] Lewis, H.-M., et al. (2023). “Nanocapillary sampling coupled to liquid chromatography mass spectrometry delivers single cell drug measurement and lipid fingerprints.” Analyst 148(5): 1041-1049.

[2] Saunders, K. D., et al. (2023). “Single-Cell Lipidomics Using Analytical Flow LC-MS Characterizes the Response to Chemotherapy in Cultured Pancreatic Cancer Cells.” Analytical Chemistry 95(39): 14727-14735.

[3] von Gerichten, J., et al. (2024). “Single-Cell Untargeted Lipidomics Using Liquid Chromatography and Data-Dependent Acquisition after Live Cell Selection.” Analytical Chemistry 96(18): 6922-6929.

[4] Kontiza, A., et al. (2024). “Single-Cell Lipidomics: An Automated and Accessible Microfluidic Workflow Validated by Capillary Sampling.” Analytical Chemistry 96(44): 17594-17601.

[5] Saunders et al (2025) , Analytical Chemistry 10.1021/acs.analchem.5c02010