The head of my lab has made me a pretty neat present: this nice old electron micrograph ! It was in an old wooden box which was left in a storage room long before my boss inherited the lab. It is made of two panels of glass, which are taped together. There is a paper frame in-between. The tape was clearly placed by hand.
Is anyone familiar with this type of glass slides ? It looks like an early photography… could it by any chance be a hand-made emulsion, made in the early days of electron microscopes ?
I am a biologist, but to my greatest shame I don’t have any clue what type of cell these are (to my defense, I haven’t made anything at the sub-cellular level since college). In the middle, I see a big cell with lots of mitochondria. It is possible to ID this cell ? Anyone’s got an idea ? Directly down and left, another cell with small dark elements in it. Are these vesicles ?
Maybe I’ll make a stand for this slide and place it near a window. Light won’t damage it, right ?
I don’t know about the handmade question, but early TEM imaging was done with and electron sensitive emulsion on a glass plate or a phosphor screen. It has been a long time but for some reason I have a recollection of yellow Kodak boxes with glass plates like yours in a lab I worked in.
As to light damage, I guess if was properly developed…
Is it perhaps an attempt to image the neuromuscular junction? The cell with lots of mitochondria also has an ordered array of little dots that remind me of a cross section of actin/myosin filaments in muscle. Below and to the left of the putative muscle cell, there are lots of vesicles of some sort, including some with a dense core and some with a clear core. That might be the end bouton of a neuron that synapses to the muscle just above or below the plane of this picture.
I’m a biologist but I have no real expertise with electron micrographs. I have seen TEM images of some neuromuscular junctions in classes and papers that are tangentially related to my work… this particular image looks familiar, but I might be seeing a NMJ because it’s the only sort of TEM I’m slightly familiar with.
In 1954, I worked as a tech assistant in a lab that had a very early (vintage 1936 or 1937) electron microscope. We took pictures on glass plates. They were a different form factor maybe 2" by 8". We could take 4 pictures (obviously 2x2) on each plate. We had a darkroom and developed (and printed, if desired) the photos ourselves.
The whole system was awkward. We would put a specimen, sitting on a thin (usually about 20 microns; we cast them on a clean water surface) plastic screen held on a wire mesh, the biological specimens dried by something called “critical point drying”, into the scope, then pumped down the vacuum, and took pictures. After that, we would let air in, click the specimen holder into a different position to get stereo, then repeat. In the photos, the picture had rotated an unknown amount (depending, I imagine, on the thickness of the plastic screen and maybe the phases of the moon) and we had the pleasure of killing our eyes by figuring out how much to rotate the prints to get the stereo effect. The specimens were nearly always, E. coli and T phages. Another thing I hated about the whole thing was the amyl acetate used in the critical point drying. Although it smelled of banana oil, it always gave me a headache.
Now that you mention it, I think that I have seen something like this too. I’ll check it. Thanks !
Nice suggestion ! On the central cell, there are a lot of small circles who could be sarcotubules. I work in neurosciences. Next time I have a chance to meet someone who works on the neuromuscular junction, I’ll ask him. Thanks for the tip !