🚀 Innovation Alert! Insight Chips has managed to make the first-ever Nano Channel Trap Chips for TEM. These chips enable effortless trapping of nanoparticles in liquid in just minutes, allowing for fast, easy, and reliable nanoparticle characterization.
Using ferritin (from horse spleen, Sigma-Aldrich Production GmbH), we simply add a droplet onto the chip's inlet. Within 10 seconds, the solution is added to the chip and thanks to the built-in traps, we know exactly where the particles can be found once inserted into the TEM.
The chip used has thin membranes of 19 nm SiN encapsulating a liquid of just around 90 nm in the ‘deep’ part, and only ~10 nm in the trap-part. Thanks to these narrow regions the liquid can pass through, leaving behind the larger particles in the extra-confined area.
With help from Paul Kempen, associate professor at DTU Nanolab, we compared liquid-phase TEM images of ferritin to cryo-images of the same sample (captured using a Tecnai T20 equipped with a TVIPS XF416 CCD camera). The liquid-phase images are nearly as good as the cryo ones but in return for slightly lower resolution, it opens up to many more new possibilities!
In the TEM any of the 50 channels can be singled out and investigated for particles. Particles will be found only on one side of the trap, in this case the top-side.
When zooming in a bit further, the ferritin particles can be seen on the top side. On the bottom side are no particles, just liquid.
Cryogenic images were taken in the same TEM of the same sample, to compare the liquid cell quality to standard methods.
The liquid ones are almost as good - but takes only a fraction of the time to prepare for the TEM, about 2-4 minutes: Straight out of the bottle and onto the chip using a pipette.
Our trap chips come with 4 inlets, just like all of our Nano Channel Chips. That means it's possible to flush, exchange, and even mix liquids — all while imaging in the particles in real-time. Imagine observing particles as the surrounding liquid is swapped for a solution with different pH, antibodies, or new particles. The possibilities going forward, are many! We’re excited to share more data and applications for these innovative trap chips soon.
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