electron microscopy tagged posts

1. Color electron micrograph of an endosome, a cell organelle. Credit: Ranjan Ramachandra, UCSD 2. Check out more of our winter holiday-themed Cool Image collections

While it may look like a pine wreath dotted with crimson berries, it is in fact one of the world’s first color electron micrographs – and the method used to create it may dramatically advance cell imaging. As his Christmas gift to himself each year, the late biochemist Roger Tsien treated himself to 2 weeks of uninterrupted research in his lab. This image is a product of those annual sojourns.

Electron microscopy (EM) is a time-honored technique for visualizing cell structures that uses beams of accelerated electrons to magnify objects up to 10 million times their actual size...

The schematic depicts the time-resolved photoemission electron microscopy instrumentation that allowed the Femtosecond Spectroscopy Unit to visualize electron movements. The 800nm pump pulse (red) excites electrons while the weaker 266nm probing pulse (blue) allows for different measurements of electron movements to be taken. Credit: Michael Man

Ever since J.J. Thompson’s 1897 discovery of the electron, scientists have attempted to describe the subatomic particle’s motion using a variety of different means. New research from the Femtosecond Spectroscopy Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) has made this process much easier.

I wanted to see the electrons move, not just to explain their motion by measuring a change of light transmission and refle...