Nitrogen-vacancy centres: Nanoscale MRI.

As promising as the method is, detecting carbon cluster ions as proxies for the carbon nanomaterials means that the method does not directly indicate whether the carbon nanomaterials have been transformed in vivo. Any reactions (for example oxidation) undergone by the nanomaterials might be apparent in any new cluster ions that appear, but knowing the extent to which the nanomaterials are degraded would seem beyond the capabilities of the current imaging method. Nonetheless, imaging mass spectrometry has a bright future when it comes to studying nanomaterials in vivo. One particularly exciting advance would be to extend the reported approach to enable the simultaneous detection of nanomaterials and nearby proteins or other biomolecules. Images that reveal what biological molecules orient themselves around nanomaterials would provide an even deeper understanding of the biochemical effects of such materials. One would think that pictures such as this might then be worth ten thousand words or more. ❐