Dear users,

 

 Due to the construction work of the electrical renovation of the 6^th floor CMU building C scheduled from Monday 1^st May until Friday 26^th May 2023, the services of the Electron Microscopy Facility (PFMU) will be temporally severely affected:

 

• Morgagni and Tecnai 20 TEM microscopes, as well as, BAF060 freeze-fracturing/etching system will be out of order (completely switched off) from Friday 28^th April 2023

• Sample preparation services for TEM: fixation, dehydration, resin embedding, ultramicrotomy and cryo-sectioning, negative staining, freeze-fracturing will be temporally suspended

• SEM imaging and FIBSEM auto slice and view remains fully operational as well as gold coating machine will be relocated to Helios SEM room (E01.3359.a) and critical-point drying device will be relocated to the Histology Facility room (D02.1553.a)

Please, keep in mind, during the renovation period there will be absolutely no access to the C06 floor section of the CMU building.

 

To resume the services back to normal:

 

• Monday 29^th to Tuesday 30^th May: Morgagni and Tecnai 20 microscopes will be back on power and checked for any issues and aligned, to be available for the users from Wednesday 31^st May 2023

• All above mentioned services will be fully operational from Monday 29^th May 2023

 

We would like to ask you to inform PFMU users from your group and to plan your experiments according the outlined schedule and we apologize for any inconvenience caused during this period.  

 

 Kind regards,

 PFMU staff

 

 

 

While the resolution of optical microscopy is above 200nm, electron microscopy allows the observation and analysis of biological specimen with resolution approaching 1nm.

EM is notably for:

1. visualizing normal and abnormal cell and tissue morphology.
2. analyzing the intracellular localization of proteins, lipids and other macromolecules.
3. Reconstructing the 3D ultrastructure of cells and tissues.

The "Pôle Facultaire de Microscopie Ultrastructurale (PFMU)" at the Medical Faculty of Geneva is a multi-user facility performing most aspects of biological research that require the use of scanning or transmission electron microscopy (SEM/TEM).
Anyone in the University research community who needs to use the PFMU facilities is welcome to do so. The facility is also open to users from other Universities and from companies.
To cover part of the costs and to be able to maintain the equipment, fees to use the equipment and fees for specimen preparation are charged to the users.

Initial contact

A prospective user should contact a member of the PFMU staff (see contact) and determine if the instruments in the facility are suitable for the proposed research.