Electron Microscopy

The Electron Microscopy (EM) Facility provides resources, technology and expertise for studying the ultra-structure of cryo-immobilized and chemically fixed biological samples.

Service:

• Sample preparation
• Sectioning
• Labeling
• Data acquisition
• Established for cell culture, worms, flies, fish and mouse

Facility:

• Training in morphology recognition
• Negative contrasting
• Immuno-localization (pre-embedding, plastic and cryo-sections)
• Training in microtome and transmission electron microscope usage

The EM Facility has established protocols that maximize the preservation of morphology for each of the major model systems in house (e.g. cultured cells, C. elegans, Drosophila, Axolotl, mouse, and zebrafish) so that the Facility can rapidly provide morphological studies to complement the on-going research projects. The EM Facility has also established routine immuno-localization techniques for popular antigens such as GFP, however, the best sample fixation and preparation techniques may differ for different antigens and antibodies and thus continuous technology development is required. Users are invited to come downstairs and work on their own specimen in the Facility.

Equipment:

• 4 leica ultramicrotomes, including cryo-ultramicrotomes
• 2 Leica Automatic Freeze Substitution units (AFS + AFS2)
• 2 High pressure freezers (BALTEC HPM 010 + Leica EMPACT2)
• 1 PELCO Microwave processing system
• 3 FEI (100-120 kV) transmission electron microscopes (TEMs), equipped with CCD cameras (SiS, TVIPS and Olympus)
• 1 TECNAI F30 FEG (300kV) TEM dedicated to electron tomography (Gatan US1000 Camera)
• 3 State-of-the-art image processing workstations with GPUs, and software for 3D electron microscopy