Leica Microsystems: Leica Science Lab

Science Lab

The knowledge portal of Leica Microsystems offers scientific research and teaching material on the subjects of microscopy. The content is designed to support beginners, experienced practitioners and scientists alike in their everyday work and experiments. Explore interactive tutorials and application notes, discover the basics of microscopy as well as high-end technologies – become part of the Science Lab community and share your expertise!

Bacteria Protocol - Critical Point Drying of E. coli for SEM

Application Note for Leica EM CPD300 - Critical point drying of E. coli with subsequent platinum / palladium coating and SEM analysis. Sample was inserted into a filter disc (Pore size: 16 - 40 μm)…

Studying Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans)

Find out how you can image and study C. elegans roundworm model organisms efficiently with a microscope for developmental biology applications from this article.

Epoxy Resin Embedding of Animal and Human Tissues for Pathological Diagnosis and Research

Application Note for Leica EM AMW - The tissues were fixed in the modified Karnovsky fixative generally by immersion overnight (at minimum 4h at room temperature). Then pieces of approx. 1mm3 were cut…

Human Blood Cells Protocol

Application Note for Leica EM CPD300 - Life Science Research. Species: Human (Homo sapiens) Critical point drying of human blood with subsequent platinum / palladium coating and SEM analysis.

Improvement of Metallic Thin Films for HR-SEM by Using DC Magnetron Sputter Coater

Preparation techniques, like several kinds of coating methods play an important role for high resolution scanning electron microscopy (HR-SEM). Nonconductive sample like biological and synthetic…

Workflows & Protocols: How to Isolate Individual Chromosomes with Laser Microdissection

During the first Leica Workshop in Brazil, at the Centro de Energia Nuclear na Agricultura/USP (CENA), the participants learned how to prepare samples for laser microdissection (LMD) using a cryotome.…

Workflows & Protocols: How to Use a Leica Laser Microdissection System and Qiagen Kits for Successful RNA Analysis

Laser Microdissection (LMD) allows isolating individual cells or chromosomes and is a well established technique for sample preparation prior downstream analysis of the nucleic acid content via PCR or…

Immersion Freezing for Cryo-Transmission Electron Microscopy: Applications

A well established usage case for cryo-TEM is three-dimensional reconstruction of isolated macromolecules, virus particles, or filaments. On one hand, these approaches are based on averaging of…

Immersion Freezing for Cryo-Transmission Electron Microscopy: Fundamentals

The high vacuum required in a transmission electron microscope (TEM) greatly impairs the ability to study specimens naturally occurring in an aqueous phase: exposing "wet" specimens to a pressure…