The newly developed rapid evaporative ionization mass spectrometry (REIMS) provides the possibility of in vivo, in situ mass spectrometric tissue analysis. The experimental setup for REIMS is characterized in detail for the first time, and the description and testing of an equipment capable of in vivo analysis is presented. The spectra obtained by various standard surgical equipments were compared and found highly specific to the histological type of the tissues. The tissue analysis is based on their different phospholipid distribution; the identification algorithm uses a combination of principal component analysis (PCA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA). The characterized method was proven to be sensitive for any perturbation such as age or diet in rats, but it was still perfectly suitable for tissue identification. Tissue identification accuracy higher than 97% was achieved with the PCA/LDA algorithm using a spectral database collected from various tissue species. In vivo, ex vivo, and post mortem REIMS studies were performed, and the method was found to be applicable for histological tissue analysis during surgical interventions, endoscopy, or after surgery in pathology.

This paper reports on a novel continuous-flow hydrogenation reactor and its integration with a liquid handler to generate a fully automated high-throughput hydrogenation system for library synthesis. The reactor, named the H-Cube, combines endogenous hydrogen generation from the electrolysis of water with a continuous flow-through system. The system makes significant advances over current batch hydrogenation reactors in terms of safety, reaction validation efficiency, and rates of reaction. The hydrogenation process is described along with a detailed description of the device's main parts. The reduction of a series of functional groups, varying in difficulty up to 70 degrees C and 70 bar are also described. The paper concludes with the integration of the device into an automated liquid handler followed by the reduction of a nitro compound in a high throughput manner. The system is fully automated and can conduct 5 reactions in the time it takes to perform and workup one reaction manually on a standard batch reactor.