November 13, 2023

Forum on Electron Microscopy — 2023 User Meeting

Mark your calendar for Nov. 13 from 11:30 a.m.–1:30 p.m., as we gather at the Roy Blunt NextGen Precision Health Building, Tom & Linda Atkins Family Seminar Room to celebrate a year of remarkable scientific achievements. Testimonies will be featured from various departments across the MU campus. This user meeting and lunch is proudly sponsored by Thermo Fisher.

View the event flyer | Register to attend | Email for questions

May 2021 

Electron Microscopy Core reopening post-COVID

Post-COVID EMC policies

  • Masks must be worn at all times
  • No more than two masked people per room
  • Attempt to maintain social distancing at all times
  • Wipe down high touch surfaces

Retraining required

  • Even if you were independent prior to COVID, we request that you become retrained
  • Our billing/reservation system (FOM) deactivates your account within one year of inactivity
  • Do NOT re-register as a new user
  • Contact EMC staff for a training upon which your independence will be reinstated

Zoom-capable microscopes

  • Due to our restricted people per room, a nice feature we have figured out is “Microscope-Zoom sessions”
  • During your scheduled use, you can have your fellow scientist join remotely on the imaging session to see the microscope interface visualizing samples together.
  • This feature has become very popular and investigators learn much more about their samples by being present while the data is collected.
  • Ask your favorite staff member how to enable a “microscope zoom session” for your colleagues to watch!

March 2021

  • EMC staff member Dave Stalla will be presenting at the Georgia Microscopical Society March 23, 2021

February 2021

  • Sweet cover image compliments of the Ron Mittler Lab and EMC staff member DeAna Grant – beautiful!!

    Science Signaling, 23 February 2021 issue cover

January 2021

Archive

  • Central States Microscopy and Microanalysis Society Fall 2019 meeting: (Schedule)  President DeAna Grant and fellow CSMMS officers hosted a very successful meeting October 16th, 2019 at Missouri Science & Technology with invited speaker, Rengarajan Pelapur from ThermoFisher Scientific, who gave our keynote lecture.  We also hosted our annual student travel award competition featuring graduate student talks from University of Missouri and Missouri Science and Technology.  Competitors were Amanda Paz Hererra (Donald Burke-Aguero, MU), Alireza Purhassan (Mohamed ElGawady, MS&T), Andrew Hoffman (Haiming Wen, MS&T), Hossein Sehhat (Krishna Kolan, MS&T), Ahmed Jasim (Yuanchang Xing, MU), Nguyen Phuoc Nguyen (Filiz Bunyak, MU), and Sukanta Kumar Mondal (M. U. Okoronkwo, MS&T).  Despite an extremely tight race, Amanda Paz was selected to receive the travel award to attend the 2020 Microscopy and Microanalysis Meeting in Milwaukee Wisconsin.  Thanks to all participants and congrats to Mandy.

  • EMC Director, Tommi White, was the featured speaker at the national Microscopy & Microanalysis 2019 “Women In Microscopy Breakfast” sponsored by ThermoFisher Scientific.  Tommi referenced an article stating how women are “better together” – inspiring other women to network more often, lift other women up, and not to fear failure.  Her presentation was featured on an blog about women scientists and she was joined by two former students Josef Brown and Ben Davis.

  • Annual EMC User Group Meeting – January 22nd 2019

  • Missouri Symposium in Biophysics — April 25-26th, 2019
    This symposium will bring together experts in the field of cryo-electron microscopy.  Structural biology pioneer Dr. Michael Rossmann from Purdue University has inspired numerous scientists and will be giving our keynote lecture.  Other cryoEM leaders speaking include: Wah Chiu from Stanford University, Elizabeth Wright from University of Wisconsin, Todd Yeates from UCLA, Tamir Gonen from UCLA, Lena Kourkoutis from Cornell University, Phoebe Stewart from Case Western Reserve & Jeffrey Lengyel from Thermofisher Scientific.  This event will include keynote lecture/dinner/poster session on April 25th , and a day of lectures on the 26th in Bond Life Sciences Center. More details.

  • Bruker Quantax 200 X-ray energy dispersive spectrometer for TEM was purchased, installed and is functional. Please contact Xiaoqing He for details and see: https://www.bruker.com/products/x-ray-diffraction-and-elemental-analysis/eds-wds-ebsd-sem-micro-xrf-and-sem-micro-ct/quantax-eds-for-tem/applications.html

  • 2018 Microscopy and Microanalysis: https://www.microscopy.org/mandm/2018/The national meeting for Microscopy and Microanalysis was held in Baltimore.  EMC director, Tommi White, organized and hosted biological tutorials for the microscopy community.   Tutorials included Alexander Rigort’s overview of “Cryo-FIB: Overcoming the Hurdle of Sample Preparation for in situ Cryo-Electron Tomography”.  CryoSparc developer and Structura Biotechnology Founder Ali Punjani presented on “Single-particle Cryo-EM: Data Processing Techniques for Obtaining Optimal Results”.  Finally a panel of successfully funded instrumentation grant awardees presented on “How to Get Funding for Instrumentation When Budgets Are Tight (Parts I and II)”.  Finally, Rayne Lim, graduate student in Veterinary Medicine and Surgery, with a travel award from the Central States Microscopy and Microanalysis Society gave an excellent presentation on her research with Shyam Chaurasia and EMC’s DeAna Grant “Retinal Ultrastructural and Microvascular Defects in Decorin Deficient (Dcn −/−) Mice”

  • 2018 Central States Microscopy and Microanalysis Society Fall 2018 meeting: http://emc.missouri.edu/csmms/We hosted a very successful meeting October 30th, 2018 entitled “The Future of Electron Microscopy: Bringing Materials Science into Focus”.  Invited MSA Tour Speaker, C. Barry Carter from UCONN, gave our keynote lecture.  We also hosted our annual student travel award competition featuring graduate student talks from University of Missouri and Missouri Science and Technology.  Competitors were Velaphi Thipe (Kattesh Katti, MU), Maakavab Arivu (Haiming Wen, MST), Alec Pickett (Suchi Guha, MU), Ahmed Jasim (Yuanchang Xing, MU), Taher Hajilounezhad (Matt Maschmann, MU), and Raul Florez (Joseph Graham, MST).  Despite an extremely tight race, Alec Pickett was selected to receive the travel award to attend the 2019 Microscopy and Microanalysis Meeting in Portland Oregon.  Thanks to all participants and congrats to Alec.
     
  • 2018 Press Release: https://munews.missouri.edu/news-releases/2018/1211-buzz-slap-ow-taking-the-virus-out-of-a-mosquitos-bite/Dr. Alexander Franz, Asher Kantor, and EMC’s DeAna Grant, characterized the viral transmission of Chikungunya virus through the mosquito midgut.  This characterization used multiple types of electron microscopy, including transmission, scanning and focused-ion beam scanning electron microscopy tomography (FIBSEM tomography).  This was our first published FIBSEM tomography from the Scios Analytical Dualbeam (http://emc.missouri.edu/fib-sem/) which was acquired with funds from the University of Missouri Office of Research.
  • Dr. Xiaoqing He, EMC’s senior research specialist in materials science, was appointed adjunct faculty in the Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering department.  This appointment will strengthen EMC’s ties with engineering and brings superior expertise in characterizing & analyzing the atomic structure:function of materials.  Please include Xiaoqing in future grant applications as a co-investigator if you need expertise in this area.  Congrats Xiaoqing!
     
  • 2018 IEEE Bioinformatics and Biomedicine – http://mlhrm.net/Computer Science (Filiz Bunyak), MU Informatics Institute (Ilker Ersoy) and Electron Microscopy Core (Tommi White) organized a workshop at the 2018 international conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine.  The workshop entitled “Machine Learning for High Resolution Microscopy” included talks from ThermoFisher Scientific, Case Western Reserve and two from University of Missouri.  These talks discussed learning architectures/frameworks, training machine/deep learning algorithms to identify/segment/classify features within microscopy images and the metrics used to assess their performance post-training.
     
  • Check out the work of our 2018 EM Excellence Award Winners. Apply for EM Excellence awards before October 1st 2017! We will be having another call for “Excellence in Electron Microscopy” awards.  New submissions will be due October 1st.
  • Microscopy and Microanalysis 2017:  We had an awesome display of microscopy research both in life and material science.  THANK YOU to everyone who participated and submitted late-breaking abstracts – we had 23 posters and one presentation.
  • Apply for EM Excellence awards before May 1st 2017! University of Missouri Electron Microscopy Core & Office of Research are providing twenty $2,500 awards for “Excellence in Electron Microscopy” to perform cutting edge electron microscopy methods, techniques and analysis.  These awards are in addition to the previous call for “EMC Fellow” recognition.
  • See highlights from EMC’s January 2017 User Group Meeting
  • Nov 10 2016: Our new DualBeam electron microscope was featured in CAFNR News
  • June 17 2016: FIB SEM installation in progress
  • April 18 2016: We installed a new high pressure freezer, the Wohlwend HPF 02 Compact.
  • EMC will install a new dual beam microscope soon, the FEI Scios DualBeam FIB SEM.
  • Need high resolution immunocytochemistry? We offer gold immuno-labeling on cryo sections now.
  • March 25 2015: We installed a Bruker Quantax 200 with Xflash6 on Quanta. With a generous contribution by Dr. Jim Schiffbauer, Department of Geological Sciences, EMC has upgraded X-ray energy dispersive spectrometer to a silicon drift detector, having 10x more sensitivity than our previous lithium-drifted silicon EDS detector. Please contact EMC staff to get training.
  • Come see EMC at Missouri Life Sciences Week on April 13th, 2015 in McQuinn Atrium, Bond Life Sciences Center.
  • The EMC is offering “Electron Microscopy and Microanalysis” (Physics 7230/4370). This course offers the both theory and operational basics on both SEM and TEM, as well as their analytical components – with dedicated time to pursue individual projects. This course is restricted to 12 students – ENROLL EARLY!
  • With a generous contribution by Dr. Jim Schiffbauer, Department of Geological Sciences, EMC has upgraded X-ray energy dispersive spectrometer to a silicon drift detector, having 10x more sensitivity than our previous lithium-drifted silicon EDS detector. We installed a Bruker Quantax 200 with Xflash6 on Quanta on March 25th, 2015. Please contact EMC staff to get training.
  • EMC is seeking funds for a high pressure freezer – the “gold standard” for maintaining superior biological ultrastructure. Contact EMC staff member Dr. Martin Schauflinger to find out more.
  • EMC is offering Electron Beam Lithography (EBL) services now. Please contact EMC staff to learn more about EBL.
  • The Central States Microscopy and Microanalysis Society will be meeting in October 2015 at Washington University for a meeting entitled “Correlative Microscopy”
  • The “Image & Spectral Processing and Analysis” Central States Microscopy and Micronanalysis Society Meeting held at Mizzou on March 26th, 2015 was held with a special seminar from MSA tour speaker, Dr. Jay Jerome from Vanderbilt University. Thanks for everyone for their participation, especially our student speakers, Josef Brown, Parinaz Emami, Raghu Sanganna Gari and Tara Selly.
  • See highlights from EMC’s January 2015 User Group Meeting
  • Division of Information Technology Interdisciplinary Innovations Fund awarded Drs. Filiz Bunyak, Michele Warmund and Tommi White in January 2015 to develop a mobile app for image analysis targeted for plant sciences & field work. Please contact Dr. Filiz Bunyak for more details.
  • EMC submitted a NSF-MRI proposal for FIBSEM on January 22nd 2015. Please let Associate Director Tommi White know of your interests related to FIBSEM or to discuss what FIBSEM can do for your research.
  • Give feedback about your satisfaction with service at the EMC