Enhanced FIB-SEM

At the forefront of volume Electron Microscopy (vEM), we welcome your collaboration to take discoveries in biology, physiology, and pathology to a whole new level using our proprietary enhanced Focused Ion Beam Scanning Electron Microscopy (eFIB-SEM) technology and its unparalleled pipeline.

Compared to conventional FIB-SEM, eFIB-SEM has expanded the maximum imageable volume by orders of magnitude and enabled much faster throughput, while maintaining the advantages of fine isotropic resolution (< 10 nm in x, y, and z) and robust image alignment (Xu et al., eLife 2017; US patent 10,600,615; Xu et al., Neuromethods 2020).

By coupling nanoscale isotropic resolution with meso- and macro-scale volumes, the enhanced FIB-SEM pipeline (Pang & Xu, 2023) represents the beginning of a new field of high-resolution large volume electron microscopy to reveal the structure-function relationships in biology. This is demonstrated by over 40 publications since the technology's debut ( Xu et al., 2017), including Nature (Xu et al., 2021; Heinrich et al., 2021; Parlakgül et al., 2022; Obara et al., 2024), Science (Nixon-Abell et al., 2016; Gao et al., 2019; Hoffman et al., 2020; Ritter et al., 2022), and Cell (Ioannou et al., 2019; Weigel et al., 2021; Sheu et al., 2022), etc., contributing more than 5,000 citations over the past five years.

Explicitly, we advanced the technology and created the first open-access, 3D atlas of whole cells and tissues at the finest isotropic resolution of 4-nm voxels (Xu et al., Nature 2021), while Janelia scientists developed the first automatic reconstructions of 35 different cellular organelle classes (Heinrich et al., Nature 2021). Using these high resolution large volume FIB-SEM data, Hotamisligil Lab at Harvard linked liver subcellular architecture to metabolic function for the first time (Parlakgül et al., Nature 2022), and Mellman Lab at Genentech revealed the very first comprehensive 3D ultrastructure of a T cell attacking a cancer cell (Ritter et al., Science 2022). Explore more seminal discoveries through the Discovery Highlights and delve into the extensive details via our Publications.