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Updated: Mar 6, 2026

Cryo-Electron Microscopic Grid Preparation for Time-Resolved Studies using a Novel Robotic System, Spotiton
Published on: February 25, 2021
A Fast and Effective Microfluidic Spraying-Plunging Method for High-Resolution Single-Particle Cryo-EM
Xiangsong Feng1, Ziao Fu2, Sandip Kaledhonkar3
1Department of Mechanical Engineering, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA; School of Mechatronics Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, China.
Abstract:
We describe a spraying-plunging method for preparing cryoelectron microscopy (cryo-EM) grids with vitreous ice of controllable, highly consistent thickness using a microfluidic device. The new polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS)-based sprayer was tested with apoferritin. We demonstrate that the structure can be solved to high resolution with this method of sample preparation. Besides replacing the conventional pipetting-blotting-plunging method, one of many potential applications of the new sprayer is in time-resolved cryo-EM, as part of a PDMS-based microfluidic reaction channel to study short-lived intermediates on the timescale of 10-1,000 ms.

