February 10, 2025
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Florida Tech Recieves Nearly $500,000 NGrant to Fund New Scanning Electron Microscope


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Analog Martian regolith. Biomaterials. Thermal coatings. Individual bacteria. Crusty ship hulls. These varied things and more will find themselves under very, very, very close scrutiny thanks to a new scanning electron microscope the university has purchased after winning a nearly $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. (Florida Tech image)

BREVARD COUNTY • MELBOURNE, FLORIDA – Analog Martian regolith. Biomaterials. Thermal coatings. Individual bacteria. Crusty ship hulls. These varied things and more will find themselves under very, very, very close scrutiny thanks to a new scanning electron microscope the university has purchased after winning a nearly $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

The new machine, the JSM-IT710HR from JEOL, is being built now and will be installed in the High-Resolution Microscopy & Advanced Imaging Center in Olin Life Sciences in early 2025. It replaces the university’s aging scanning electron microscope.

Thought to be at least 15 years old, the current machine “has significant challenges, including suboptimal resolution and the need for multiple sample preparation steps” that can limit its full effectiveness, noted Chris Bashur and Vipuil Kishore, associate professors of chemical engineering and directors of the Functional Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering Laboratory. It has been repaired and maintained for years but now parts are harder to find given its age.

Bashur uses scanning electron microscopy, or SEM, in research in his lab that focuses on vascular tissue engineering that also incorporates drug delivery approaches. The SEM with the new cryo-feature can provide the ability to image both the polymeric fibrous grafts and the bioprinted water-containing hydrogels.

Kishore uses SEM in his lab research, which focuses on the development of collagen-based biomimetic scaffolds for use in musculoskeletal tissue-engineering applications. SEM can characterize the surface properties of these collagen scaffolds and “assess the impact of these properties on cell response.”

Awarded under the NSF’s Major Research Instrumentation Program, the $488,373 grant, led by principal investigator Andrew Palmer with Bashur as co-PI, will fund a powerful tool useful across multiple disciplines, Palmer said.

A traditional optical microscope, which uses light, can only see so much given the nature of light’s wavelengths. In an electron microscope, far smaller electrons replace light waves and allow for a much closer surface examination, down to two nanometers in size, or two billionths of a meter.

“It really gets down onto the surface of things,” said Palmer, an associate professor of biological sciences. “The surface of a leaf might look smooth under a regular microscope, but under an electron microscope, we see it’s not smooth at all but features caverns and hills and mountains, comparatively to what we see.”

Using SEM to examine Martian or lunar simulants – soil that is similar to the regolith found in those places – means Palmer and his students can see the shape of the individual grains and how that changes depending on what they treat it with, critical knowledge as they explore ways to grow food in these challenging environments.

“This significantly increases our functionality,” Palmer said of the new microscope.

What also has Palmer, Bashur, Kishore and others excited is that the new microscope will include a cryostage specimen platform. One of the challenges of the existing SEM is preparing samples, which can be a time-consuming process involving multiple dehydration steps for hydrated samples and gold sputter coating for non-conductive samples.

And even when rigorous, multi-step preparation is conducted, the sample may still become compromised with the exiting SEM, leading to distortions and artifacts in the images.

With a cryostage, the samples can be viewed in lows vacuum mode with fewer preparation steps, and the rapid freezing, at minus 180 degrees Celsius or colder, ensures better retention of sample integrity.

The new microscope also has a partnership element, Palmer said. Students at Eastern Florida State College, Eckerd College and Winston Salem State University, a historically Black university, will be provided training and be able to utilize it remotely for sample analysis.

“We’re hoping to build collaborations with some of these partner institutions,” Palmer said.

The goal is to eventually create a curated repository of images from the scanning electron microscope that can be accessed and used by connected institutions.

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