We are going to try FIB tomography on biological samples.
Anyone interested?

Dusha said:

We are going to try FIB tomography on biological samples. Anyone interested?

It will be very interesting if you elaborate a little bit about your research and the type of biological samples you are going to study.

Roshan said:

It will be very interesting if you elaborate a little bit about your research and the type of biological samples you are going to study.

Myself I'm from material science and we successfully use FIB tomography for transistor faults evaluation for example. I'm not sure how to call what we'll have as "biological sample".
Resolution of the method should be of the order of 1-2nm and if one uses heavy metal for contrasting, the contrast should be pretty good.
So the idea came to try stained cells embedded in plastic, as far as we are not aware of any trials of this kind.
The advantages before TEM tomography seems to be: no need for alignment (i.e. no need for markers), thickness is close to unlimited (i.e. one can slice 50x50x50 mu cube for example).

FIB works quite like a microtome, only uses a Focused Ion Beam for removing material, and SEM for observing what is left. FIB tomography means: remove 1nm layer, make an image, remove next 1 nm, make an image ...... then put all images in 3D stack and you are there.

Dusha, It sounds a perfect instrument for me to work on some amazing fossil. I want to apply FIB in the research on ancient life. I have fossil cytoplasm in hand. It is well-preserved and I wish to study its ultrastructure using FIB. I would be happy to cooperate with you. wx0