FAST-EM – Fast Accessible Serial Transmission EM

Mapping the connectome of whole brains of multiple individuals or of larger animal species is very valuable to neuroscience. Presently, the only techniques capable of delivering complete connectomes are costly in time and money.

The gold standard is electron microscopy, which delivers densely imaged volumes at nanometre resolution from which all neuronal arbours and synapses are reconstructed.

GridTape TEM offers among the lowest cost per yield, but presents barriers to broad adoption such as high costs per sample and restricted hardware availability. Here, we propose to develop GridTape TEM beyond its original conception for low-cost, high-throughput imaging.

To this end, we will design out the need for costly support films to drastically reduce costs per sample, and devise a new approach to imaging that minimises costly sample stage movement to greatly improve throughput.

To ease application beyond our lab, the design targets a variety of existing transmission electron microscopes already available in facilities world wide. As a proof of principle, the extended goals include imaging the brain of a honeybee and of a small gecko lizard.

Our proposal holds the promise of democratising access to high-throughput volume electron microscopy, opening new avenues of research within neuroscience and beyond.