Electron Microscopy service facilities

Reminder: SWEHSC Investigators (including their staff and students) should contact the Cellular Imaging Shared Service directly for advice regarding experimental design, training, and technical support for this instrument.

AHSC Imaging facility
This is a full service electron microscopy lab. Users typically drop off samples and provide the lab with any special handling instructions. Users then can come back to operate the microscopes (with training), or have the lab photograph their samples using the digital camera. Because of the labor-intensive nature of electron microscopy, the turn-around time for this lab (samples => images) is about 3 weeks to 1 month.

Instruments

Phillips CM-12s Transmission Electron Microscope

Capabilities: The microscope can perform transmission electron microscopy (TEM), as well as scanning (SEM) & scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM). TEM of plastic embedded biological tissues typically has a maximum resolution of approximately 25 nm. This microscope has a 4Mpixel digital camera (AMT) and the digital images can be saved in the Tiff file format. Image files can be transferred via USB flash drive or burned to a CD-R.

Advantages: Provides extremely high resolution images of well preserved tissue.

Disadvantages: The technique is expensive and often takes >3 weeks to receive images of tissues. Interpretation of the data requires experience in ultrastructural analysis (Interpretation assistance is available from the Cellular Imaging Shared Service).

FEI-Phillips XL30 Scanning Electron Microscope
(This instrument is currently broken and it is not under a service contract. The Phillips CM-12s can be used to perform SEM on small samples, or the samples can be imaged using the instruments at the main campus USIF.)

Capabilities: The microscope can perform scanning electron microscopy (SEM) with output to either traditional Polaroid film ($2/ea), video printer, or digital images (100MB ZIP drive is available). The instrument has secondary electron, and back-scattered electron detectors.

Advantages: Provides the ability to study surface topography at high resolution.

Disadvantages: Specimen preparation typically requires critical point drying. It is difficult to measure SEM images for topography differences.

Selected fees: (contact the facility for more detailed information, these fees are effective Oct 1, 2008)

Service	Transmission EM	Scanning EM
1 micron, semi-thin sections (includes cost of tissue processing)	$20 per slide	N/A
Thin sections	$49 per block	N/A
Microscope - routine use	$31 per hour	$31 per hour
Microscope - operator assisted use	$65 per hour	$65 per hour

University Spectroscopy and Imaging Facilities

This companion facility is located in room 101 the Marley building on the main campus. This is a full-service biological and materials science TEM and SEM facility. There are number of very nice electron microscopes in this facility, many of them with energy-dispersive x-ray microanalysis capabilities. For biological electron microscopy, contact David Bentley at 621-5097 or dlb@email.arizona.edu. For more information see the University Spectroscopy and Imaging Facilities website.