A new method of accurately mapping deposits of trace metals in the brain could help unlock the causes of degenerative brain diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's according to scientists at the University of Technology, Sydney.

In what they're calling Metal Imaging Mass Spectrometry (MIMS), a UTS Faculty of Science team lead by Dr Philip Doble has devised a tool that will give better information to medical researchers working to isolate causes of disease and develop treatments.

The work has attracted the support of the international analytical instrument manufacturer Agilent Technologies, which has donated $42,000 to support the research this year.

Dr Doble said the study of metals and their interactions with proteins in the body was a relatively new area of research, broadly known as metallomics.

"The study of metallomics is generating huge interest as there is increasing evidence that the excessive accumulation or imbalance of metals play a role in the development of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease," Dr Doble said.

"We think MIMS has the potential to be revolutionary in the understanding of these sorts of neurological diseases, but it could also be applied to something like cancer research – metals are associated with 30 per cent of proteins in the body."

The UTS team already has had excellent results mapping the brains of rats in which Parkinson's disease had been chemically induced.

"MIMS involves the use of laser ablation – a pinprick of the sample is vaporised by a laser and this is fed to a mass spectrometer for analysis," Dr Doble said.

"With multiple sampling we can build up a picture of the spatial distribution of trace metals in a way not unlike a dot-matrix printer.

"The results are output as colour images showing the concentration of various metals – such as zinc, copper, magnesium and iron. These can, for example, highlight differences in metal concentrations around a Parkinson's lesion site in the brain.

"The implications of this are enormous, ranging from new knowledge of the disease pathology, identification of drug targets, and the determination of efficacy or otherwise of existing drug regimes."

Dr Doble said the next stages of the work were to improve both the speed and resolution of the MIMS method and demonstrate its power and usefulness to the medical research community.