Automation of Tilt Series Acquisition in Transmission Electron Microscopy for Applications in Biology and Materials Science

Abstract

During the last decade, computation of a three-dimensional image from a tilt series (3D reconstruction) has become a well established method, of which a variety of implementations are available. The term “electron tomography” is now generally used for this type of data acquisition and 3D reconstruction. An overview over the techniques involved is given in.With the introduction of micro-processor-controlled TEMs and cooled slow-scan CCD cameras and with the progress in performance of high-speed computers, automation of complex imaging procedures became mainly a task of developing appropriate software, using the control facilities of the microscope. in this way, automated electron tomography was realized in 1990 at the Max- Planck-Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, and at about the same time at the University of California in San Francisco (UCSF). New techniques for automatic focusing and alignment, developed somewhat earlier , have been integrated in these automated tomography procedures. in the following we discuss the requirements of automatic data acquisition and the present implementation for several TEMs.