Electron-Microscopes

This Monday, September 1, was the day each year I call the "Melancholy Day." It's the last time that the swimming pool outside my apartment building is open. On that day, after a full afternoon of kids splashing as usual, the pool caretakers take in all the white plastic deck chairs and regular chairs, and stack them in the poolhouse for storage. I am glad that I was scheduled to work on Monday, Labor Day, because otherwise I would have to watch this activity. It's sad for me because it means that summer is over.

Now the the pool water will be neglected. As if in some suburban pseudo-Japanese haiku of elegant sadness, a few early yellow leaves will fall onto the undisturbed surface while it is still a glorious aqua color. But in a week or so, algae will build up in the pool and it will turn a murky yellow. The pool people will drain it down a bit, remove the metal ladders around the rim, and pack everything up before they go home to whatever Eastern European country they came from.

September still has some warm times ahead, but all I can think of is being freeze-dried for the winter, stumbling around in my heavy jacket and enduring the mind-numbing torture of the "holiday season." I constantly think of moving to a warmer southern part of the country, but it seems they have a bit of rough weather these days. It's going to be a long eight months before April.

High-pressure freezing (HPF) has been generally accepted as the most reliable method for cryofixation of biological samples, yielding a deep vitreous freezing. In recent cell biology, mammalian cultured cells are widely used, but HPF of cultured cell monolayer has not reached its full potential. In this study, we developed a new reliable device for HPF of cultured cell monolayer by using a 10-µm-thin stainless disc both as culture plate and specimen carrier. We describe the practical procedure, and demonstrate fine structures of HeLa cells cultured and cryofixed on the stainless discs as results.