Ambient Ionization Mass Spectrometry Today and Tomorrow: Embracing Challenges and Opportunities

Ambient ionization mass spectrometry (AIMS) has grown into a group of emerging analytical techniques that allow rapid, real-time, high-throughput, in situ, and in vivo analysis in many scientific fields including biomedicine, pharmaceuticals and forensic sciences. While dozens of AIMS techniques have been introduced over the past two decades, their broad commercial and industrial use is still restricted by multiple challenges. In this perspective article, we discuss the most relevant technical challenges facing AIMS, i.e., reproducibility, quantitative ability, molecular coverage, sensitivity, and data complexity, and scientists’ recent attempts to overcome these hurdles. Furthermore, we present future directions of AIMS from our perspective, including the necessity that efforts should be made to unravel blind biomolecules in routine analysis, construction of a data depository for AIMS users, full automation of pipelines for prospect integration in a robotic laboratory, movement toward on-site tests, and ...