MRI: Acquisition of a Cryo Field Emission Transmission Electron Microscope

Suny College Of Environmental Science And Forestry, Syracuse NY

Investigators

Abstract

An award is made to State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) to acquire a field emission scanning/transmission electron microscope (FES/TEM) with cryo-capabilities and elemental analysis using Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy (EDS). This instrument will replace a 30 year-old failing TEM in the shared-core N.C. Brown Center for Ultrastructure Studies at ESF. This project is a joint partnership of three adjacent universities, ESF, SUNY Upstate Medical University (UMU) and Syracuse University (SU). This new FES/TEM will provide these institutions with capabilities that are currently not available in central New York, and will expand the research capabilities of faculty and graduate students at these institutions, and provide support for competitive extramural funding. The NC Brown Center at ESF offers a unique academic program, a "Microscopy Minor" in central New York with graduate and undergraduate coursework and comprehensive formal training in the theory and application of microscopy such as: sample preparation, instrumentation and interpretation of results. This acquisition will enhance these academic offerings. In addition to its academic program, the Center routinely provides light, scanning and transmission microscopy demonstrations to community and industrial groups including outreach activities and demonstrations. This project will support such activities. The new FES/TEM will facilitate interactive, online high school and client access, with potential to provide interactive information with online demos. The new TEM enables the asbestos testing lab at ESF to become the only local laboratory to offer both phase contrast and TEM asbestos analysis for the asbestos remediation industry. Societal benefits of the project include raising scientific literacy of students and the public, providing students with skills for employment, providing potential for research that can result in wide-ranging impacts such as new vaccines or drug delivery systems for disease prevention, as well as environmental and industrial impact from the development of novel nanomaterials. Acquisition of this cryo-capable field emission scanning and transmission (S/TEM) will permit advances within a wide-range of research groups at ESF, SU and UMU. Among these, at ESF: better tracking of measurable chemical changes and ultrastructure in fish ear stones due to environmental conditions, chemistry of both inorganic and organic nanoparticles, with potential use in targeted drug delivery, studies of wood cell wall degradation by fungi affecting forest trees and wood products, studies of insect vectors of human and plant diseases; at SU: this microscope will determine size and shape of semi-conductive quantum rods and alloy nanoparticles, atomic imaging and elemental inspection of atomic derived lattice planes and compositional gradients in alloy nanoparticles, S/TEM and EDS analysis of compositional changes in hetero-structured nanoparticles, S/TEM of stacking faults and extended defects in quantum dots, and analysis of protein and DNA modified nanomaterials; and at UMU: the proposed field emission electron source with its superior brilliance and beam coherence will produce high contrast images from frozen hydrated biological macromolecules at much better resolution than is now possible with the older machine. Such data will allow 3-D structure determination of ATP molecular motors. The high resolution 4K CCD camera will enable high throughput situations especially when thousands of images are collected for single particle or 3Dimensional reconstruction. The motorized goniometer will enable generating tomographic or tilted reconstructions of cryo sections of animal or plant cells revealing the internal structure and location of organelles, virus or nanoparticles as well as large drug molecules without the confusing artifacts created by chemical fixation. This microscope features a 2 nanometer resolution for examination of unstained samples, bacteria, viruses, proteins, nanoparticles and at the same time, map and locate elements. This new generation S/TEM will have a field emission gun, cryo-capable stage, Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectrometer, 4K CCD digital camera, electron diffraction, tomography software, and remote access. This instrument permits entry into the fields of protein folding, molecular motors, materials research, 3D reconstruction of single particles, cryo-imaging and elemental analysis. The FES/TEM with these options will enable visualization and reconstruction of subcellular particles, drug delivery vehicles, identification of elements in biological samples and nanoparticles, and localization of pharmaceuticals in target tissues by cryo-sections; all things that cannot be achieved with present instrumentation.