Revealing Structure and Localization of Steroid Regioisomers through Predictive Fragmentation Patterns in Mass Spectrometry Imaging

Identifying and mapping steroids in tissues can provide opportunities for biomarker discovery, the interrogation of disease progression, and new therapeutics. Although separation coupled to mass spectrometry (MS) has emerged as a powerful tool for studying steroids, imaging and annotating steroid isomers remains challenging. Herein, we present a new method based on the fragmentation of silver-cationized steroids in tandem MS, which produces distinctive and consistent fragmentation patterns conferring confidence in steroid annotation at the regioisomeric level without using prior derivatization, separation, or instrumental modification. In addition to predicting the structure of the steroid with isomeric specificity, the method is simple, flexible, and inexpensive, suggesting that the wider community will easily adapt to it. We demonstrate the utility of our approach by visualizing steroids and steroid isomer distributions in mouse brain tissue using silver-doped pneumatically assisted nanospray desorption electrospray ionization mass spectrometry imaging.