The Advanced Microscopy Facility (AMF) at the University of Virginia is a core service and user facility sponsored by the School of Medicine that has provided microscopy services to the university and surrounding community for over 30 years. An average of 85 Principal Investigators (PIs), and upwards of 200 individual researchers uses the services and instrumentation of the AMF annually. Electron microscopy has been a mainstay of the facility since its establishment in 1979. To aid PIs at UVA, many of whom are NIH supported, in their conduct of cutting edge research, the AMF strives to offer state-of-the-art instrumentation. The existing scanning electron microscope (JSM-6400) at the AMF is over 20 years old and does not meet two specific requirements of many current or potential future users: the ability to achieve very high resolution at a high magnification, and the ability to achieve nearly as high resolution in imaging delicate parts of samples at low accelerating voltages. The existing JSM-6400 is simply not capable of meeting the needs of the NIH funded projects of the current users. The purchase of the proposed JEOL JSM-7001F TTLS thermal field emission SEM would result in a large number of biomedical researchers at UVA finally being able to acquire high quality, high resolution scanning electron micrographs. Specifically, the thermal field emission gun, combined with through-the-lens optics, guarantees a resolution of 1.2 nm at 30 kV and 2.0 nm at 1 kV on the requested SEM, compared to 3.5 nm at 35 kV achievable with the existing tungsten filament SEM. Importantly, no other scanning electron microscope at the University of Virginia is set up for and available for dedicated biomedical research use. Therefore, acquisition of the JSM-7001F TTLS will allow major users of the AMF to achieve the stated aims of their funded projects and will offer a significantly improved scanning electron microscope with capabilities needed but not currently available to biomedical researchers at UVA.
| Tuttle, Marcus D; Comellas, Gemma; Nieuwkoop, Andrew J et al. (2016) Solid-state NMR structure of a pathogenic fibril of full-length human ?-synuclein. Nat Struct Mol Biol 23:409-15 |
