Czech scientists are the first in the world to have imaged an entire chromosome in its native state. Thanks to a new revolutionary imaging method, researchers from the Institute of Scientific Instruments of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS), in collaboration with the Institute of Experimental Botany of the CAS, achieved what experts from leading laboratories all over the world have been striving for. Revealing the structure of the chromosome surface, consisting of protrusions and chromatin fibers spatially organized in loops, has potential implications for fields like medicine and agriculture. The new imaging method heralds significant improvements in electron microscopy for the scientific community.

Ľubica Vetráková is engaged in the research of ice and frozen aqueous solutions. She uses especially the advanced environmental scan electron microscopy (A-ESEM) combined with another physical-chemical methods of samples characterization for the study of ice micro-morphology, its dynamic changes and for the contaminants localization.

On Tuesday, 5 March 2024, the opening of the exhibition "The Microscopic Enigma of Floral Development" took place in the Science and Art Gallery of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS). The exhibition was opened by the president of the CAS, Eva Zažímalová. The exhibition was created based on a long-term scientific collaboration of scientists from the Environmental Electron Microscopy Group of the Institute of Scientific Instruments of the CAS and the Institute of Biophysics of the CAS. The exhibition can be visited in the Science and Art Gallery at the headquarters of the CAS on Národní třída, Prague until June 14, 2024, every weekday from 10 am to 6 pm. Free admission.

The impact of salt aerosols arising from salty ice in polar regions on weather, climate, and the atmosphere is significant and contributes to the destruction of ozone or the conversion of mercury in the environment into a more toxic form. Does the sublimation of salty ice produce harmless, larger chunks of salt or potentially dangerous small particles that will rise into the atmosphere in the form of aerosols? What will these salt particles look like and what properties will they have? The answers not only to these questions were brought by the research of Brno scientists from the Environmental Electron Microscopy Group of the Institute of Scientific Instruments of the Czech Academy of Sciences (ISI CAS), led by Assoc. Prof. Vilém Neděla, Ph.D., in cooperation with the group of Assoc. Prof. Dominik Heger from Masaryk University and Dr. Xin Yang from the British Antarctic Survey (Cambridge, UK).

“Electron microscopy is a ride! We are rewriting the biology and chemistry textbooks, this year we are going to publish one of our breakthrough research results," says Vilém Nedela, who is the head of the Environmental Electron Microscopy team at the Institute of Scientific Instruments of the Czech Academy of Sciences.

Eva Tihlaříková from the Scientific Group of Environmental Electron Microscopy of the ISI of the CAS won the Best Photography Award for the I. Research Area of the Expert Jury for Science Photogenic Competition 2022 and the Prize of the Academic Council for the image "Demon".

From June 10, 2022, an exhibition of a photograph collection created in collaboration between scientists from the Institute of Scientific Instruments of the CAS and the Institute of Biophysics of the CAS was held in the Institute of Biophysics of the CAS vestibule.

This spring, an issue of the specialized journal Geophysical Research Letters was published, with an image created by the Environmental Electron Microscopy group on its cover.

Scientists from the Institute of Scientific Instruments of the CAS, together with their Slovak colleagues, presented a new method that pushes the boundaries of environmental scanning electron microscopy possibilities in the research and development of very sensitive samples in their natural state. This method can be used, for example, for the development of new drugs.

A unique electron detector, introduced half a year ago, contributed to an important discovery. Thanks to it, the team from Brno imaged rotifers from the Brachionus calyciflorus species complex in their natural moist environment and thus became a world leader in this field. Moreover, the detector helped scientists to discover hitherto unknown species of these tiny, invisible by naked eye organisms.

A team of Brno scientists from the Environmental Electron Microscopy group at the Institute of Scientific Instruments of the CAS led by Ing. et Ing. Vilém Neděla, Ph.D in collaboration with doc. Dominik Heger from Masaryk university and Xin Yang from British Antarctic Survey (Cambridge, UK) make a unique observation of frost flowers using a specially modified electron microscope. Recently, they disproved a hypothesis about the role of so-called frost flowers in the formation of salty aerosols in polar regions and their influence on the ozone layer destruction. Results of this research were newly published in a prestigious scientific journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

The Brno scientists received a prestigious award from the Japanese Microscopy Society. They have described, for example, a method for observing living organisms in an electron microscope without causing them to die. Domestic experts have thus confirmed their worldwide reputation and will expand cooperation with foreign researchers.

A new laboratory with a unique electron microscope has been opened at the Institute of Scientific Instruments of the CAS in Brno. The instrument pushes the previous boundaries of difficult-to-visualise sample observation. It will be possible to observe them in their natural state thanks to a specially adapted environment. The institute bought the microscope from FEI and will test its own applications and systems on it, told the research team leader Vilém Neděla to ČTK.

A team of Brno scientists from the Institute of Scientific Instruments of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Mendel University have introduced a new method of observing plant samples in their natural state to the world. The method, which pushes the boundaries of electron microscopy, has been presented at several world congresses and has been published in prestigious microscopy journals such as Microscopy Research & Techniques or Microscopy and Microanalysis.

On Monday, over 100 young talents in electron microscopy from the Czech and Slovak Republics gathered in Brno. The Institute of Scientific Instruments of the Czech Academy of Sciences is hosting the Autumn School of Fundamentals of Electron Microscopy, which is also being supported by the Institute of Physics of Materials of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the companies FEI Czech Republic s.r.o., TESCAN a.s., and Delong Instruments a.s.

The prestigious American journal Microscopy and Microanalysis has published a study by Brno scientists from the Institute of Scientific Instruments of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Thanks to their new method, living organisms can be observed in an electron microscope without costing them their lives. The method pushes the boundaries of electron microscopy towards a more gentle way of studying living nature and can help in biology, pharmacy, and even in the food industry. Studying surviving organisms in a conventional electron microscope is impossible due to the very low gas pressure around the sample. Until now, science has been able to study living organisms for a longer period of time only with a light, or optical microscope, which often lacks sufficient depth of field and resolution.