High Pressure Freezer

EMPACT II

The Leica EM PACT2 high pressure freezer with Rapid Transfer System (RTS) is a high pressure freezing system for vitrifying samples up to 200µm in thickness without the artefacts of chemical fixation.

• Chemical fixation via diffusion is a slow process that may take minutes to hours. Furthermore, not all cell components will react with fixatives at equal rates, or to equal degrees. As a result, some cell components may be lost or rearranged.
• Physical immobilization of all cell components by ultrarapid freezing has been shown to be superior to conventional chemical fixation at room temperature.
• The Leica EM PACT2 makes it possible to observe aqueous biological and industrial samples in their near-native state while preserving high-resolution information of EM immunocytochemistry, frozen hydrated sections, and freeze fractured samples.
• The Leica EM rapid transfer system (RTS) allows correlative LM/EM experiments (CLEM), taking a live specimen from a light microscope (e.g. confocal) to freezing in less than 5 seconds.
• High pressure freezing may be used to prepare samples for cryoTEM, cryoSEM, for subsequent preparation of freeze-fracture replicas for TEM, and for freeze-substitution. It has also been successfully applied to non-biological materials such as latex emulsions and inks for cryoSEM examination.

This instrument was purchased with funding from an NIH S10 Shared Instrument grant award.