Acquisition of a Cryostage and Transfer System to Characterize Biological Systems and Frozen Materials with Environmental Scanning Electron Microscopy

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Acquisition of a Cryostage and Transfer System to Characterize Biological Systems and Frozen Materials with Environmental Scanning Electron MicroscopyA grant has been awarded to Dr. Patricia A. Holden and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) for purchasing equipment to look at the fine structure of frozen materials. The equipment, a Cryostage and Transfer System, will be mounted on an environmental scanning electron microscope that UCSB acquired through a previous NSF award. The combined system supports every aspect of modern environmental, biomolecular, bioengineering and materials sciences. With an environmental scanning electron microscope, researchers can observe complicated biological, geological and manmade materials without having to damage the samples by coating or drying beforehand. The addition of the cryostage and transfer system allows scientists to look at snow or ice, or to freeze biological tissues and look at them while frozen. UCSB scientists and engineers will now be able to work with frozen samples of all types and thereby learn about the real, unaltered structure of important, delicate materials.Long term, many projects will use the CST-ESEM. Initial projects include:Discovering how much water is held by bacterial colonies in soil aggregates by freezing, fracturing and observing internal water. We will study temperate and tundra soils to learn about how bacteria live in each type of soil. Observing bonding of ice crystals, called sintering. Sintering, or lack of sintering, controls avalanche hazard in alpine regions.Determining the impurities in snow. Snow contains atmospheric pollutants that are released with initial melting.Freezing bacteria that have been tagged with special identifying molecules. We can learn where and how the tags attach and thereby study how pollutants interact with bacteria.Learning how new "tunable" biological materials change over time by freezing and imaging them at different times in their development. Such materials have promise for new artificial tissues, adhesives, and improved drug-delivery.The broad significance of acquiring the cryostage for our microscope is multifold. First, researchers from UCSB and beyond will use this instrument to study socially relevant themes such as pollutant biodegradation by soil bacteria, avalanche formation, release of concentrated pollutants in snowmelt, speculations about extraterrestrial life, likely changes that global warming will cause, and the next generation of biomedical materials and devices. Second, we will teach many students how to acquire state-of-the-art data so they can develop into the next generation of well-trained environmental and medical problem-solvers. Third, we will advance the research infrastructure nationally because ours will be one of the first environmental scanning electron microscopes with a cryostage in the USA. Finally, we will attract and help researchers from UCSB, the local region, and around the world, thus enlarging the influence of our research infrastructure.