Underground at St Pancras

When you next take a train from St Pancras have a think about what might be going on beneath your feet.

Just across the road from the station, and 28 metres below the pavement, world leaders in their field are working with some of the highest resolution microscopes on the market to investigate the causes of cancer and other diseases. 

The recently opened Frances Crick Institute brings together scientists from all over the world under one roof and is a partnership between Cancer Research UK, Imperial College, King's College, the Medical Research Council, University College London and the Wellcome Trust. 

I was privileged to be invited to visit recently and I would like to thank the Head of Electron Microscopy, Lucy Collinson, and her colleague, Marie Charlotte, for an extremely interesting tour of the labs. 

Linkam in France: deuxième partie

The Gateway College bridge crosses the river Rhone  in Lyon.

Renowned for its exquisite food, rich cultural history and annual Festival of Lights, Lyon is one of France’s most visited cities. We are excited to announce Linkam will be heading there soon. 

The European Microscopy Congress will take place at the Lyon Convention Centre from the 28th August to the 2nd September. This will be Linkam’s second trip to France this year after the highly successful European Materials Research Society spring meeting.

With over 2000 guests, several hundred guest speakers, specialised workshops and symposia covering the life sciences, instrumentation and methods and materials science, EMC will be an excellent platform to showcase our stages. 

We’ll be taking along the tensile TST350, cryo-correlative CMS196, dual pan DSC, humidity system RH95 and one of our electrical probe stages, the LTS420 E-PB4. 

Come over to booth 3 to discuss how our stages can enhance your sample characterisation needs - we look forward to seeing you there.

Lighting the Way

Next week, Linkam will be taking a short trip to Didcot, in Oxfordshire, for the ‘UK Bio-XFEL Single Particle Imaging Workshop’ hosted by Diamond Light Source (the UK’s national synchrotron science facility). The event will take place on the 2nd and 3rd June in the Pickavance Theatre at the Science and Technology Facilities Council, at Harwell. 

The two day workshop is aimed at the life science sector, mainly biological and biomedical. X-ray Free Electron Lasers (X-FEL) have been used by biological researchers in x-ray crystallography, but another application - Single Particle Imaging (SPI) - is gaining rapid attention due to its ability to determine 3D structures without crystallisation. The workshop gives voice to field experts and focuses on encouraging and demonstrating the use of X-FEL for SPI to laboratory scientists.

Come over to our stand to see our cryo-correlative CMS196, the tensile TST350 and the high temperature TS1500.

We look forward to seeing you there and discussing your sample characterisation needs!

New Video: Cryo-CLEM grid mapping

CMS196M automated mapping of an EM grid at high resolution.  

The cryo-correlative stage, CMS196M can automatically map EM grids at high resolution making it a simple matter to find and record the co-ordinates of the key areas of interest in your sample. The video above shows how easy it is to set up the CMS196M with the new LINK software and create high resolutions maps of the full EM grid.