Repair and upgrade of the high resolution biological SEM

The Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) in our facility is broken at the moment. The device we have is the only dedicated high-resolution biological SEM at KU Leuven and is already 12 years old. With the grant, we want to repair and update our SEM. The aim of the current grant is to keep our existing device available as a service on a first come first serve basis for all life science researchers at KU Leuven. There are some SEM microscopes at Material Sciences available, which however are not suited for biological samples. Recently Dr. Natalia Gounko joined Dr. Peter Baatsen from our facility to support future EM projects and applications. With the current applications, we want to ensure that this crucial technique stays available at the KU Leuven. The repair will also allow developing new cutting edge technology such as array tomography approaches here at the KU Leuven. Array tomography is a new high-throughput imaging method for unprecedented high-resolution imaging of tissue architectures using ultrathin serial sections of tissue specimens, combined with SEM imaging of these arrays followed by computational high-resolution 3D reconstruction.

Keywords:high resolution biological SEM

Disciplines:Genetics, Systems biology, Molecular and cell biology