Cryo-Electron Microscopy Facility

The 1,300 square foot cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) facility is in a newly renovated space in the basement of VCU’s McGlothlin Medical Education Center, at 1201 E. Marshall St, Richmond, VA. The facility provides investigators with the capability to carry out cryo-EM and 3D reconstruction of proteins and macromolecular complexes up to high resolution.

The facility is endowed with a Thermofisher Scientific Tundra cryo-electron microscope and all necessary ancillary equipment: a Vitrobot Mark IV cryo-plunger, a Pelco easyGlow glow discharge unit, a Denton DV 502B evaporator, a bench for negative staining, and a bench for cryo-grid loading. The facility also has a linux server with 250 TB storage and four 20 GB GPUs with image processing software (cryosparc, spider, phenix, coot, chimera, chimerax, etc). The equipment was purchased using Virginia General Assembly Higher Education Equipment Trust Fund and VCU funds.

The goal of cryo-EM is to obtain the three-dimensionalstructure of purified macromolecular complexes such as proteins, protein-DNA, protein-RNA, and protein embedded in small liposomes. In addition to 3D density maps at different levels of detail up to near-atomic resolution, cryo-EM data reveals other important structural information such as location of ligands, subunit organization, conformational landscape, and identification of regions of variability.

The cryo-EM facility operates as a full-service core, performing sample preparation for negative staining and cryo-EM, high throughput data collection, and image processing. The facility will also provide training on all these operations to enhance access and user capability.

In addition tos providing service to the VCU community, we also offer cryo-EM services to outside organizations. Please contact us for your cryo-EM needs and/or potential collaborations.

Services

Discussion on feasibility
Negative staining sample preparation
Cryo-EM sample preparation
High throughput cryo-EM and negative staining data collection
On-the-fly preliminary 3D structural determination (simultaneous to data collection)
Image processing (2D averaging, 3D reconstruction, 2D and 3D classification, etc.)
3D structure rendering and interpretation, model building
Training on negative staining, cryo-EM sample preparation, data collection, image processing, model building, and rendering of 3D structures.