New Transmission Electron Microscope

Twenty-five years ago this December, Manager Greg Hendricks, PhD, and Co-Directors Roger Craig, PhD and George Witman, PhD, established the first Electron Microscopy Core Facility at the University Campus.  Since then, they have continuously tried to bring to the UMass Chan Medical School “state-of-the-art” instrumentation and techniques to investigate the puzzles and complexities of structural biology.

The latest addition to the lab, a ThermoFisher (FEI) Tecnai G2 T20 Transmission Electron Microscope follows in that tradition. This instrument was a gift from the HHMI at Janelia Research Campus and is a major upgrade to the older CM120 that it is replacing.

The FEI Tecnai TF20 is a 200kV high-resolution Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM), suitable for room-temperature and cryo applications, including imaging of specimens ranging from single molecules to semi-thick frozen cells or plastic-embedded sections for electron tomography to produce 3-dimensional reconstructions of biological structures.

When fully operational, this instrument will feature a column-mount wide-angle Gatan Orius CMOS CCD camera system and a Gatan K2 Summit Direct Electron Detector capable of counting individual electron events to yield images of macromolecules at a resolution previously obtainable only by X-ray diffraction. Efforts currently are underway to install the direct-electron camera, which will enable resolution about 10X better than that of our current CMOS CCD cameras.