Project Summary/Abstract: This proposal seeks funding for a Gatan Inc., OneView scintillator-
coupled sCMOS transmission electron microscope (TEM) camera, a OneView 16bit computer
with a Windows 10 operating system, and Gatan Microscopy Suite V3 software. This new sCMOS
TEM camera will replace and upgrade the Stanford University Cell Sciences Imaging Facility’s
Electron Microscopy Core’s (EMC) aging and obsolete CCD TEM camera. Every molecular, cell
and tissue biomedical research program has needs for microscopic visualization of research
specimens. For many biomedical research projects this visualization requires greater resolution
than that provided by light microscopy. Therefore, researchers seek the much higher resolution
provided by electron microscopy. Since 2002, the Cell Sciences Imaging Facility (CSIF) has
provided Stanford researchers with a full service EM core lab that provides complete sample
preparation, training and support for both transmission and scanning electron microscopy
dependent research. The requested sCMOS TEM camera will be used on the EMC’s transmission
electron microscope to digitally record TEM images of biomedical samples. It will be used in both
high and low electron dose TEM imaging applications and will be used to correct, in real time, the
inherent drift of TEM samples. The CSIF has long supported biomedical TEM digital imaging at
Stanford and is well positioned to provide ongoing support of this advanced capabilities TEM
sCMOS camera. The CSIF’s current TEM camera is a 9 year old, cooled CCD camera that can
no longer meet the demanding imaging needs of Stanford’s NIH funded electron microscopy
imaging community. This older TEM camera has a slow, limiting frame rate and over the years
the scintillator screen and its directly coupled CCD have lost sensitivity and accumulated ‘dead’
pixels. Additionally, if has a limited field of view, poor signal to noise ratio, and a lower dynamic
range compared to newer, state-of-the-art TEM sCMOS cameras. Perhaps most limiting,
compared to the requested OneView sCMOS TEM camera, is that the EMC’s current TEM CCD
camera lacks drift correction. The requested OneView sCMSO camera will significantly advance
the research projects of 15 different users, 14 of which have NIH funded projects and of those, 2
are Noble laureates. These researchers’ projects cover a diverse range of biomedically important
questions from, for example, the biomechanics of hearing, neural stem cell maintenance and
homeostasis, ventricular hypertrophy and failure, to the mechanisms of viral infection and
olfaction in sensory neurons, as well as the development of biomedically useful nanoprobes and
super-resolution cryogenic correlative light and electron microscopy.