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Analog Mars regolith. biomaterials. thermal coating. individual bacteria. Rugged hull. All of these things and more are under very, very, very close scrutiny thanks to a new scanning electron microscope the university purchased with a nearly $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. It will be placed below. (Florida Institute of Technology image)
Brevard County • Melbourne, Florida – Analog Mars Regolith. biomaterials. thermal coating. individual bacteria. Rugged hull. All of these things and more are under very, very, very close scrutiny thanks to a new scanning electron microscope the university purchased with a nearly $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. It will be placed below.
The new machine, JEOL’s JSM-IT710HR, is currently in production and will be installed at Olin Life Sciences’ High-Resolution Microscopy and Advanced Imaging Center in early 2025. The machine will replace the university’s aging scanning electron microscope.
Though believed to be at least 15 years old, current machines “present significant challenges, including suboptimal resolution and the need for multiple sample preparation steps,” which limit their full effectiveness. Chris Bashur and director Vipuil Kishore, associate professors of chemical engineering, said that Affiliated with the Functional Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering Laboratory. It has been repaired and maintained over the years, but due to its age, parts are now difficult to find.
Bashur uses scanning electron microscopy (SEM) in his research in a lab focused on vascular tissue engineering that also incorporates drug delivery approaches. SEMs with new cryogenic capabilities offer the ability to image both polymer fiber grafts and bioprinted hydrogels.
Kishore uses SEM in research in his lab focused on developing collagen-based biomimetic scaffolds for use in musculoskeletal tissue engineering applications. SEM can characterize the surface properties of these collagen scaffolds and “assess the impact of these properties on cellular responses.”
The $488,373 grant, awarded under NSF’s Major Research Instrumentation Program, was led by principal investigator Andrew Palmer and co-principal investigator Basheur, and will provide a powerful tool that will be useful across multiple disciplines. Palmer said it will provide funding.
Conventional optical microscopes that use light can only see a limited number of things due to the nature of the wavelength of light. In electron microscopy, much smaller electrons replace light waves, allowing for more detailed examination of surfaces down to 2 nanometers, or two billionths of a meter in size.
“It really gets to the surface of things,” says Palmer, an associate professor of biological sciences. “The leaf surface looks smooth under a normal microscope, but when you look at it under an electron microscope, you can see that it’s not smooth at all and features caves, hills, and mountains compared to what we see. ”
Using SEM to study similar materials on Mars and the Moon (the regolith-like soils found at those sites) allows us to study the shape of individual particles and how they change depending on what we do with them. This means that you can see what is going on and gain important knowledge. Explore how to grow food in these challenging environments.
“This gives us a huge increase in functionality,” Palmer said of the new microscope.
What excites Palmer, Bashur, Kishore and others is that the new microscope includes a cryo-stage specimen platform. One of the challenges of existing SEM is sample preparation. This can be a time-consuming process involving multiple dehydration steps for hydrated samples and gold sputter coating for non-conductive samples.
Additionally, even with rigorous multi-step preprocessing, samples can be damaged in existing SEMs, leading to image distortions and artifacts.
Using a cryostage, samples can be observed in low-vacuum mode with fewer preparation steps, and rapid freezing below -180 degrees Celsius better preserves sample integrity.
There’s also a partnership element to the new microscope, Palmer said. Students from Eastern Florida State University, Eckerd College and Winston-Salem State University, a historically black college, will be trained and made available remotely for sample analysis.
“We would like to build partnerships with some of these partner institutions,” Palmer said.
The goal is to eventually create a curated repository of images from scanning electron microscopes that connected institutions can access and use.
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