On 2D-FTIR-XRF microscopy - A step forward correlative tissue studies by infrared and hard X-ray radiation

Correlative Fourier Transform Infra-Red (FTIR) and hard X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) microscopy studies of thin biological samples have recently evolved as complementary methods for biochemical fingerprinting of animal/human tissues. These are seen particularly useful for tracking the mechanisms of neurological diseases, i.e., in Alzheimer/Parkinson disease, in the brain where mishandling of trace metals (Fe, Cu, Zn) seems to be often associated with ongoing damage to molecular components via, among others, oxidative/reductive stress neurotoxicity. Despite substantial progress in state-of-the-art detection and data analysis methods, combined FTIR-XRF experiments have never benefited from correlation and co-localization analysis of molecular moieties and chemical elements, respectively. We here propose for the first time a completely novel data analysis pipeline, utilizing the idea of 2D correlation spectrometry for brain tissue analysis. In this paper, we utilized combined benchtop FTIR - synchrotron XRF mapping experiments on thin brain samples mounted on polypropylene membranes. By implementing our recently developed Multiple Linear Regression Multi-Reference (MLR-MR) algorithm, along with advanced image processing, artifact-free 2D FTIR-XRF spectra could be obtained by mitigating the impact of spectral artifacts, such as Etalon fringes and mild scattering Mie-like signatures, in the FTIR data. We demonstrated that the method is a powerful tool for co-localizing and correlating molecular arrangements and chemical elements (and vice versa) using visually attractive 2D correlograms. Moreover, the methods' applicability for fostering the identification of distinct (biological) materials, involving chemical elements and molecular arrangements, is also shown. Taken together, the 2D FTIR-XRF method opens up for new measures for in-situ investigating hidden complex biochemical correlations, and yet unraveled mechanisms in a biological sample. This step seems crucial for developing new strategies for facilitating the research on the interaction of metals/nonmetals with organic components. This is particularly important for enhancing our understanding of the diseases associated with metal/nonmetal mishandling.