EDS for Life Science
EDS in S/TEM is particularly useful if many elements in a material have to be determined at once. This is the case for quite a few life science applications. The figures show an interesting application, a yeast cell, which has been osmium stained and silver labelled. The EDS map acquired within 24 minutes at a solid angle of 0.12 sr and a take-off angle of 22° clearly reproduces the Ag labelling (which appears as small dark features on the bright field image) but, additionally EDS delivers the distribution of all the other elements in this cell sample; for example N, C, S and P. Also, mixed element maps provide interesting information as they correlate the distribution of different elements. The figures contain two examples of mixed display, an element map of C and O and one of N, Os and Ag.
The largely improved performance of TEM-EDS invites a new nanoscale characterization experiments in life science.
