UC Davis gets $2M to build video microscope

Wednesday, May 13, 2009, 2:08pm PDT
UC Davis gets $2M to build video microscope
Sacramento Business Journal - by Mark Anderson Staff writer

Scientists at the University of California Davis were awarded a $2 million grant to develop an electron microscope capable of filming biological processes.

The team hopes to extend the capabilities of dynamic transmission electron microscope by using it to film rather than just take pictures. The grant is from the National Institutes of Health.

The microscope can take pictures at the rate of 10 to 100 images per millionth of a second. And those images can capture details as small as 10 nanometers, which is about four times the size of a DNA molecule. The team will attempt to capture images as small as one or two nanometers.

The research team will be led by Nigel Browning, a professor of chemical engineering and materials science at UC Davis and a staff scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.