Comparison of Conventional and Electron Spectroscopic Imaging in the Fixed Beam Electron Microscope of Ordered Protein Arrays
CTEM brightfield images are formed by a combination of relatively high resolution elastically scattered electrons and unscattered and inelastically scattered electrons. In the case of electron spectroscopic images (ESI), the inelastically scattered electrons cause a loss of both contrast and spatial resolution in the image. In the case of ESI imaging on the Zeiss EM902, the transmited electrons are dispersed into their various energy components by passing them through a magnetic prism spectrometer; a slit is then placed in the image plane of the prism to select the electrons of a given energy loss for image formation. The purpose of this study was to compare CTEM with ESI images recorded on a Zeiss EM902 of ordered protein arrays. Digital image processing was employed to analyze the average unit cell morphologies of the two types of images.