Biological Electron Microscopy Facility

This week sees the annual doctoral school course, ‘Introduction to Electron Microscopy for Life Scientists’ being run by the BioEM Facility (see here for details). This course covers the basics of sample preparation and imaging of biological samples in both transmission and scanning electron microscopy.

Kenneth Hayworth of Janelia Research Campus (HHMI, USA) has recently shown in a paper on bioRxiv that a gas cluster ion beam can be used to mill wide areas, top-down, from a sample surface ready for imaging with a scanning electron beam. This approach can potentially image very large volumes of biological samples, and lends itself to imaging brain tissues for the reconstruction and discovery of neural circuits. Some of the material in this paper was prepared in the BioEM Facility. The paper can be seen here.

Graham Knott, office AI0143
tel: +41 21 6931862