A modern cryo-EM instrument for biological samples at Imperial College London

Imperial College London harbours a Facility for electron microscopy (EM), which allows structural analysis of biological samples down to a scale of near-atomic resolution. In the past 5-10 years, EM underwent a dramatic technical revolution with strong influence on biology, medicine and chemistry. It today allows researchers to get atomic scale-resolved structures of highly complex molecules or cellular sub-structures, in remarkably short time. Our Facility currently has four electron microscopes, which are all technically outdated (pre-2000) and which also increasingly started showing technical issues. These problems sometimes became impossible to repair, due to non-availability of spare parts or service contracts for antiquated equipment. For our very large (>70), mostly College-based crowd of EM users this makes research much less efficient and much less competitive in the fast advancing, international research context. In this application we are therefore requesting financial support for a modern electron microscope for biological samples.