Collaboration between Gatan and Carl Zeiss Microscopy: Gatan 3View turns Zeiss FE-SEM into a high-speed 3D imaging system
Pleasanton (CA, USA), May 31, 2012: Today, a collaboration is announced between Carl Zeiss Microscopy, a leading supplier of light and electron microscopes (EMs), and Gatan Inc., a world-leader in the design and manufacture of instrumentation and software which enhances the performance of electron microscopes. In their first joint project, the companies will promote the development and sales of systems which combine a high-performance Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope (FE-SEM) with Gatan’s 3View® technique, to deliver automated generation of high-resolution 3-dimensional (3D) data from large-volume samples.
“We’re pleased to see the vision of Zeiss, who see the potential to bring this technology into application spaces that can benefit from the resolution of high-end electron microscopy, but with data from sample volumes much larger than expected from EM. Furthermore, the Zeiss-Gatan system offers a level of automation and ease-of-use that will make it available to many new markets and researchers”, says Ben Wood, Acting President of Gatan.
Kevin Scudder, General Manager of Gatan’s SEM Products Division, responsible for the 3View® product, said “Serial Block Face SEM is recognized as the technique for acquiring high resolution 3D datasets with truly massive fields of view. We are very glad that Zeiss is joining us in bringing instrumentation to a wider audience; their expertise in the fields of light and confocal microscopy will add greatly to the development of this technique in the life science community. We look forward to adoption by optical microscope users, where 3D data is appreciated, but there is a desire for far higher resolution than possible optically, but still with large volumes of sample analyzed."
3View® simplifies 3D electron microscopy, providing researchers without EM expertise an opportunity to collect high resolution volumetric datasets by removing the traditional bottleneck of laborious cutting and collecting of ultrathin sections for later examination by TEM. It enables the automated serial block-face SEM imaging of embedded samples (e.g. cells or tissue), with slice thicknesses from 15 down to a few nanometres. Data stacks containing hundreds, or thousands, of images of sequential slices are generated, providing a 3-dimensional map of the sample with nanometre resolution.
The first pilot customers are already using these systems, around the world, among them Renovo Neural Inc. (Cleveland, USA), which is also using the system to offer a 3D-EM commercial service.
