Electron Microscope Facility

Facilities are shared with the Nicastro lab.

FEI Morgagni 286 A 100 kV scope with a tungsten filament electron beam source and an AMT lens-coupled 1k x 1k CCD camera (bottom mounted). This microscope is used regularly for routine sample screening.

Philips CM12 A 120 kV scope with a LaB6 electron source and a Gatan UltraScan 1000 2k x 2k CCD camera (bottom-mounted). It is cryo capable and has is used for collecting data from negatively stained and cryo specimens, and for collecting electron diffraction data from 2D crystals on CCD. Because this microscope operates at a lower voltage than the F30 (see below), this instrument is often used for collecting cryo-EM data from specimens for which high contrast rather than high resolution is desired.

FEI Tecnai F20 A 200 kV scope with a field emission electron source and a Gatan UltraScan 4000 4k x 4k CCD camera (also bottom-mounted). The F20 is used mainly for single particle cryo-EM data and plastic section tomography.

FEI Tecnai F30 A 300 kV scope with a field emission electron source, an FEI Falcon 4k x 4k direct electron detector (bottom-mounted) and a Gatan Image Filter (GIF 2000) with a 2k x 2k CCD camera (also bottom-mounted). The F30 is used mainly for single particle cryo-EM data collection. Moreover, it is used to collect electron tomography data on the GIF.

Gatan Cp3 Cryo Plunger A semi-automated cryo-plunger.

FEI Vitrobot Mark II A semi-automated cryo-plunger.

Home-Made Cryo Plunger Compressed air driven plunger with foot switch control.

Emitech Glow-Discharge Units Two glow-discharge units to treat carbon-coated grids. One of the units is reserved for amylamine while the other unit is used with all other gases.

Edwards Carbon Coater An evaporator with an oil diffusion pump system. It is routinely used for making high quality carbon film.

Gatan Dry Pumping Stations Two pumping stations for Gatan cryo holders. The lab has five Gatan cryo holders that are used with the CM12 and F30 microscopes.

Zeiss SCAI Flatbed Scanner A photographic film scanner. It is used to digitize images recorded on film plates.

Nikon Coolscan 9000ED A photographic film scanner with a modified film holder to accommodate photographic film plates used with electron microscopes. This scanner is mainly used as a backup for the Zeiss SCAI scanner.

Bench Top Diffractometer A folded beam bench top-style diffractometer. It has a laser beam and an LED to display a diffraction pattern and real space image of electron micrographs at the same time. No darkroom is needed for its operation.

Cryo Grid Storage System A LN2 auto-filling system that is dedicated for storing cryo grids. It has 54 high cylinders, each of which can hold four 50ml tubes. More information about currently stored grids can be found here.

Linux Computer Cluster A 372 core computer cluster for heavy-duty computing. This cluster is dedicated to EM image processing and only used by the Grigorieff and Nicastro labs. 30 TB of regularly backed up redundant disk space is available for data storage.