State-of-the-art application of mass spectrometry imaging covering the medicinal and edible plants

Modern researches on medicines and foods have proposed greatly increasing demand on the spatial distribution analysis of the medicinal and edible plants (MEPs). Mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) is a newly flourishing imaging method widely employed in the spatial distribution analysis of various tissue samples. Relying on versatile ionization techniques and improvement in sample processing, MSI can more quickly and completely characterize the metabolites in MEPs. This review gave a comprehensive summary on the principles, characteristics, general workflows, and typical applications of MSI on MEPs in the past decade (2013–2023). Localization analysis of the multi-category compounds by MSI could facilitate characterization of the medicinal/toxic/nutritional parts of MEPs, the phytochemical changes during the growth or processing, spatial metabolomics differentiation among the species, in vivo animal tissue distribution of the active components, and spatial metabolomics for drug discovery and target elucidation, beneficial to pharmacological mechanism elucidation, quality control, cultivation, and breeding of MEPs.