Seminar

Cryo- Soft- X-ray Tomography for the Life Sciences at Diamond

Maria Harkiolaki, PhD

B24 is the cryo transmission soft X-ray microscopy beamline at Diamond, the UK synchrotron source. It has been designed with the life sciences in mind and access is allocated dependent on proposal submission and approval.

The beamline is tunable within an energy range between 200eV to 2.6keV but predominantly operates at the ‘water window’ offering absorption contrast which is relevant to biological samples. This currently allows the imaging, at a resolution of 40nm or better, of whole fully-hydrated cells that have been vitrified without sectioning, fixation or staining. The microscope operates in vacuum and sample change is semi-automatic. Data is collected as tilt-series and processed to produce 3D tomograms which allow the visualisation of the target cellular population and their features.

The primary scientific application for this beamline is the investigation of cellular structures and in specific the morphology of organelles, their internal structures and their relationships with their surrounding membranes and those of the cell.

The technique offers itself to correlative approaches and our data can be correlated to data generated from other imaging techniques such as electron microscopy and fluorescence microscopy thereby extending the information content and providing a structural framework for interpretation of results.