Okay kiddo, let me explain desorption electrospray ionization (DESI) in a way you can understand.
Have you ever blown on a dandelion and watched all the little seeds fly away? Well, that's kind of what DESI does!
First, imagine you have a substance you want to study. Maybe it's a medicine, maybe it's something found in nature, or maybe it's something else entirely.
To study it, you need to turn it into ions - little pieces with charges on them. Scientists use a special machine to do that. DESI is one kind of machine that does this.
When your substance is in the DESI machine, a special liquid is sprayed onto it. This liquid helps break apart the substance into tiny pieces, like the dandelion blowing in the wind.
Next, a strong electric field is applied to those tiny pieces. This electric field makes some of the pieces become ions - remember, those little pieces with charges on them!
Finally, the ions are sucked up into a special detector that measures them and tells the scientists what they're made of.
So, to sum it up: DESI is like blowing apart a dandelion into tiny pieces, turning some of those pieces into ions with charges on them, and then measuring those ions to learn more about the substance you started with!