Electron Microscopy service facilities

Reminder: SWEHSC Investigators (including their staff and students) should contact the Cellular Imaging Facility Core 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 resolution of approximately 10 nm and 2 nm for negatively stained materials. 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 Facility Core).

Scanning Electron Microscopes

The Phillips CM-12 can perform scanning electron microscopy on small samples, but for larger samples, or for high magnification and/or high resolution SEM work, users are usually referred to the USIF facility on main campus.

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
1 micron, semi-thin sections (includes cost of tissue processing)	$24 per slide
Thin sections	$50 per block
Microscope - routine use	$26 per hour
Microscope - operator assisted use	$64 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 more information see the University Spectroscopy and Imaging Facilities website.