Microscopy and Microanalysis | 2021
Development of High Throughput Cryo Electron Microscope with Cold Field Emission Gun (CRYO ARMTM 300Ⅱ)
Abstract
[Outline] X-ray diffraction and nuclear magnetic resonance have been used for the structural analysis of the biomolecules such as proteins. In recent years, a structural analysis by Single-Particle Analysis (SPA), using a cryo electron microscope, has been getting popular. The reasons for this are that the method requires no crystal samples and that the method gives drastically improved spatial resolution. It was realized by new analysis software and a direct detection high speed camera. And the SPA requires large number of images for obtaining good reconstruction. Therefore, these images should be collected by automatic acquisition system. The number of these images is essentially indispensable for improvement of the signal to noise ratio (S/N) by averaging in image processing. Quite recently, to meet these requirements, we developed a cryo TEM (CRYO ARM TM 300 II shown in Fig. 1) better than the previous equipment on data throughput and usability. These improvements were realized by the new functions shown as follows.