Rationale: In Time‐of‐Flight Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (TOF‐SIMS), pulsed and focused primary ion beams enable mass spectrometry imaging, a method which is particularly useful to map various small molecules such as lipids at the surface of biological samples. When using TOF‐SIMS instruments, the focusing modes of the primary ion beam delivered by liquid metal ion guns can provide either a mass resolution of several thousand or a sub‐µm lateral resolution, but the combination of both is generally not possible. Methods: With a TOF‐SIMS setup, a delayed extraction applied to secondary ions has been studied extensively on rat cerebellum sections in order to compensate for the effect of long primary ion bunches. Results: The use of a delayed extraction has been proven to be an efficient solution leading to unique features, i.e. a mass resolution up to 10000 at m/z 385.4 combined with a lateral resolution of about 400 nm. Simulations of ion trajectories confirm the experimental determination of optimal delayed extraction and allow understanding of the behavior of ions as a function of their mass‐to‐charge ratio. Conclusions: Although the use of a delayed extraction has been well known for many years and is very popular in MALDI, it is much less used in TOF‐SIMS. Its full characterization now enables secondary ion images to be recorded in a single run with a submicron spatial resolution and with a mass resolution of several thousand. This improvement is very useful when analyzing lipids on tissue sections, or rare, precious, or very small size samples. © 2015 The Authors. Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Molecular networks (MN) allows to organize tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) data by spectral similarities. Cosine-score used as a metric to calculate the distance between two spectra is based on peak lists containing fragments and neutral losses from MS/MS spectra. Until now the workflow excluded the generation of molecular network from electron ionization (EI) MS data as no selection of the putative parent ion is achieved when performing classical gas chromatography (GC)-EI-MS analysis. In order to fill this gap, new functionalities on MetGem 1.2.2 software (https://github.com/metgem/metgem/releases ) have been implemented and results from a large EI-MS database and GC-EI-MS analysis will be exemplified.