A Testbed for Automated Acquistion From a TEM

We are developing a testbed for automated identification of specimens, and acquisition of high resolution images for 3D macromolecular EM. Several software package which have been developed specifically for acquisition of tomographic data sets have illustrated the benefits of automation. These software packages require the user to identify a specimen of interest and then automatically acquire a single tilt series from the identified specimen. The testbed we are developing will provide a generalized system for specimen identification, image acquisition and image quality assessment. The goals of the testbed are to provide a system that will acquire EM images unattended by an operator. The testbed integrates a computer controlled TEM with a distributed real-time image processing environment. Computerized control and image acquisition from the TEM uses the emScope software package (1). This is coupled to existing image processing software packages and new software tools developed specifically for this project.