Lab news: A single plant virus on a carbon film

The rod-shaped Tobacco mosaic virus (TMV, red) is 300 nm long. Here we immobilised it on a thin holey carbon film (yellow), a standard method for electron microscopy (EM) imaging.

For the EM enthusiasts: The interesting point is that the virus was not imaged by TEM at >=100 kV, but by STEM at 30 kV in a microscope that is normally dedicated to SEM (Quanta 250 FEG from FEI). The virus was not stained, as usually done for TEM, but simply dried from a very diluted suspension (courtesy of Christina Wege, Uni Stuttgart/DE).