Patent ID: 8362415

Claim:
A method of analyzing biological material wherein said biological material has a region of interest, comprising the steps of: exposing the biological material to a recognition element, exposing the biological material to a mass tag element, exposing said recognition element, said mass tag element, and the biological material to a cleavable linker resulting in said recognition element and said mass tag element, being connected by said cleavable linker, cleaving said cleavable linker, using a time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometer for directing an ion beam of said time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometer to the biological material producing secondary ions, wherein said step of directing an ion beam to the biological material comprises directing an ion beam of a finely focused energetic primary-ion beam of a time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometer to the biological material, interrogating the at least one region of interest area of the biological material by accelerating said secondary ions into said time-of-flight mass spectrometer where they are analyzed for mass by measuring the time-of-flight of said secondary ions from the biological material to the detector, producing data and distributing said data in plots including measures of similarity.