CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Synchrotron radiation combined with capillary optics has been used as an optimal x-ray source for microanalysis. It can be used to excite x-ray fluorescence and this approach leads to very low detection limits on micrometric areas on very small samples. Synchrotron microscopic XRF (μ-SRXRF) allows quantitative study of the nature and degree of heterogeneity of inorganic constituents in biological samples. This microbeam method, due to intrinsic characteristics of SR, is able to implement multielemental spectrochemical analysis with spatial resolution on the micrometer scale. It shows high efficiency for element determination and short time of analysis requirement. In the present work, we applied μ-SRXRF to study spatial distribution of elements on normal and cancerous human breast tissue in order to identify possible correlations induced by the desease. In these studies spatial redistribution of trace elements due to biochemical changes in tumors may be observed.