With NIH grant, CU 麻豆影院 to become national center of cryoelectron tomography
The grant will also help the university upgrade its electron microscopy and tomography facility
The 麻豆影院 will be one of four national centers designed to advance the application of cryoelectron tomography (cryoET), which helps visualize in 3-D the fine-structure of intact cells and tissues, the National Institutes of Health announced (NIH) today.
CU 麻豆影院 scientists, who have been at the forefront of this technology, have won a six-year, $7 million grant for the center.
Cryo-electron tomography is a method in which vitrified specimens are imaged at different tilt angles in an electron microscope to construct high-resolution three-dimensional images.
The principal investigators of the new service center are Andreas Hoenger and Michael Stowell from the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology and Karolin Luger from the Department of Biochemistry.
CU 麻豆影院 scientists, who have been at the forefront of this technology, have won a four-year, $7 million grant for the center."
Through this grant (), researchers from around the country will receive remote and on-site training and technical assistance in sample preparation for cryoelectron tomography from CU 麻豆影院 experts.
The grant will also help the university upgrade its electron microscopy and tomography facility, especially with a new scanning electron microscope, supplemented with a focused ion beam miller (FIB-SEM). This instrument will produce vitrified lamellae of cells and tissues, which will then be imaged with cryoET.
CU 麻豆影院 has five decades of leadership in electron microscopy. The founding chair of the MCDB Department, Keith Porter (after whom Porter Biosciences is named), followed by J. Richard McIntosh, was one of the pioneers of cellular electron microscopy.
Through the work of Professor Emeritus Andrew Staehelin and McIntosh, MCDB also pioneered the subfields of electron microscopy, high-pressure freezing, freeze-etch and freeze-fracture EM. And for many years, MCDB hosted one of a handful of High Voltage Electron Microscope National Centers and the 麻豆影院 Laboratory for 3D Electron Microscopy of Cells.
More recently, CU 麻豆影院 acquired a $5 Million Krios cryo-electron microscope, spearheaded by Luger and other contributors, which places 麻豆影院 at the forefront of cryo-EM based cellular and macro-molecular research.
For more information, visit the .
BioKEM鈥攐r Biochemistry Krios Electron Microscopy鈥攊s now open and available to CU 麻豆影院 researchers and occasional external or industry use.