Editorial

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Traditionally microscopy has been separated into materials and biological applications, but these divisions break down in fields such as nanotechnology and tissue engineering where there is a need to understand actions of materials components at the cellular and intracellular level. Microanalytical techniques with their ability to identify elemental content at the nm scale offer considerable promise in these areas of research, but their application is not always straightforward. Routine procedures developed for specific applications in one field are not always appropriate when applied in another, and may cause misleading results. This issue of J Microsc. brings together a number of papers dealing with the application of microanalysis at the interface between materials science and biology. The subjects dealt with include the effects of standard fixation and embedding procedures on nanoparticle composition, (Cross et al.), the inadvisability of using standardless quantitation routines with biological specimens (Warley), problems encountered in SEM analysis of cells cultured on biocompatible substrates (Tylko) and correlation of results produced from FIB SEM with those from TEM to overcome sampling problems that occur in thin section TEM studies (Hondow et al.). Lawrence et al. present their results achieved using soft X-rays as the source of X-ray excitation, the advantage of this technique being that minimal specimen preparation is required. Whilst Zeitvogel et al. present a plug in for Image J to tackle the problem of extracting information from the large data sets that can be produced from microanalytical studies. Together these papers tackle different aspects of problems that may be encountered when undertaking analysis at the materials biology interface and should provide a very useful reference point for workers in the field.