click to enlarge ARGOS: Isosurface rendering of cellular architecture showing matched particle location and orientation after fitting high resolution macromolecular complexes within the cellular volume.

Electron microscope manufacturer FEI Company has released this week a set of software applications designed to increase the throughput and ease-of-use of its electron microscopes for biological research. According to the company, the four software packages make electron microscopes more useful for life science researchers involved in structural, cellular and tissue biology as they build the full solution from sample to biological answer.

“We are very excited to announce a correlative workflow utility that helps to bridge the gap between light microscopy and electron microscopy,” says Dominique Hubert, FEI's vice president and general manager of the Life Sciences Division. “Now researchers can use a routine light microscope to locate a feature of interest, and then transfer the sample to an electron microscope, which can be used to easily navigate to the feature and view the cellular ultrastructure. Correlative platforms such as this could actually speed the process from research to discovery.”

Correlative Navigation Utility aids correlation of navigational coordinate systems between different types of microscopes, such as optical and electron microscopes. Investigators can leverage the strengths of each platform, for example, in using the resolving power of electron microscopy to image structures localized by fluorescent tags in a light microscope.

EPU is an automated data collection procedure that facilitates the acquisition of large data sets (from thousands or tens of thousands of nominally identical particles) used to reconstruct high resolution 3D models with the single particle analysis technique.

click to enlarge Correlative Navigation Utility (CNU): Identifying the three anchor points in the light microscopy image and the electron microscopy image used to correlate position between the two modalities.

ARGOS (Automated Recognition of Geometries, Objects, and Segmentations) is a 3D template fitting capability that helps to localize macromolecules in their native cellular context and relate orientation properties of these molecules to their environment.  It combines high resolution molecular structure information that was determined by single particle analysis with 3D cellular context from tomography.

Extended Slice & View is a 3D reconstruction technique that combines automated serial cross sectional SEM image acquisition into a virtual 3D volume image of the tissue or cell. The images may be stitched together from multiple images of the section surface to retain nanometer scale detail over many micrometer fields of view. The focused ion beam (FIB) cross sections can be as thin as a few nanometers, providing near isotropic resolution in the X, Y and Z dimensions. The technique has the potential to model whole cells and tissues with sufficient resolution to differentiate lipid bilayers.

FEI Life Sciences