MAINTENANCE AND REPAIR OF THE IVEM F30

University Of Colorado, Boulder CO

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Abstract

This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. In the reporting period of 4/1/06-4/30/07, the F30 microscope has been used to generate 1414 tilt-series, despite being down for 64 hours due to the replacement of the HT tank and 35 hours for the installation of a new chip for the Ultracam. 105 hours was spent on software and hardware development, much of which was directly caused by suggestions from our SerialEM workshop. The F30 was in use 36 hours/week (2017.25 hours for 56 weeks). From September 1, 2006, we started keeping track of hours by clocking in and out vs. just total hours logged. From that data, we have determined that about 24% of microscope time is after hours (5pm-8am M-F and weekends). Figure 1 illustrates the F30 usage based on the total number of hours used. Plastic and cryo imaging are sessions devoted to checking samples and mapping areas for later tomography. Training specialized cryo-sessions and time spent on the SerialEM Workshop. Figure 2 shows the division of different types of tomography work conducted on the F30 during the reporting period: single or dual-axis tomography of plastic-embedded sections at room temperature (Plastic TS) including montaged data sets. A montage was treated as a sum of single-frame tilt-series i.e. if it was a 2X2 montage, it was counted as 4 tilt-series, Cryo tomography (Cryo TS) is considerably more time consuming hence there were less tilt-series taken.