Transmission And 3D Volume Electron Microscopy: Clinical, Preclinical, And Research Applications And Methods

Course overview

Transmission electron microscopy TEM is essential for biomedical research and clinical pathology including renal, muscle, ciliary, and viral diagnostics. Now, a new type of EM is exploding in importance for preclinical research, and across biosciences ranging from neuroscience to cancer and even botany. This new-ish EM is collectively called 3D-EM or volume EM vEM and includes serial block face, array tomography, and focused-ion-beam scanning EM. The power of vEM is that it provides molecular resolution comparable to TEM but of 100 um3 3D volumes! In 2023, vEM was identified as one of the 7 technologies to watch Nature described as a quiet revolution Nature Methods and the subject of Methods in Cell Biology volume 177, and more! Specimen preparation for vEM is much like that for clinical TEM biospecimens are sequentially processed in glutaraldehyde, osmium tetroxide, heavy metal stains, solvents, and epoxy embedded. However, vEM requires much more intensive heavy metal staining than TEM, requiring 4-5 days of manual preparation while similar manual TEM prep requires only 2-3 days of effort. Therefore, vEM specimen prep places a considerable new burden on laboratory staff who are already tied up with tedious time-consuming TEM specimen preparation. This is especially problematic since multiple reports describe a shortage of trained EM scientists due to retirements and that few EM specialists are entering this workforce.