CLAIRE Brings Electron Microscopy to Soft Materials

Soft matter encompasses a broad swath of materials, including liquids, polymers, gels, foam and—most importantly—biomolecules. At the heart of soft materials, governing their overall properties and capabilities, are the interactions of nano-sized components. Observing the dynamics behind these interactions is critical to understanding key biological processes, such as protein crystallization and metabolism, and could help accelerate the development of important new technologies, such as artificial photosynthesis or high-efficiency photovoltaic cells. Observing these dynamics at sufficient resolution has been a major challenge, but this challenge is now being met with a new non-invasive nanoscale imaging technique that goes by the acronym of CLAIRE.

CLAIRE stands for “cathodoluminescence activated imaging by resonant energy transfer.” Invented by researchers with the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Univ. of California Berkeley, CLAIRE extends the incredible resolution of electron microscopy to the dynamic imaging of soft matter.

“Traditional electron microscopy damages soft materials and has therefore mainly been used to provide topographical or compositional information about robust inorganic solids or fixed sections of biological specimens,” says chemist Naomi Ginsberg, who leads CLAIRE’s development. “CLAIRE allows us to convert electron microscopy into a new non-invasive imaging modality for studying soft materials and providing spectrally specific information about them on the nanoscale.”

 Scanning electron microscopes use beams of electrons rather than light for illumination and magnification. With much shorter wavelengths than photons of visible light, electron beams can be used to observe objects hundreds of times smaller than those that can be resolved with an optical microscope. However, these electron beams destroy most forms of soft matter and are incapable of spectrally specific molecular excitation.

Ginsberg and her colleagues get around these problems by employing a process called “cathodoluminescence,” in which an ultrathin scintillating film, about 20 nm thick, composed of cerium-doped yttrium aluminum perovskite, is inserted between the electron beam and the sample. When the scintillating film is excited by a low-energy electron beam (about 1 KeV), it emits energy that is transferred to the sample, causing the sample to radiate. This luminescence is recorded and correlated to the electron beam position to form an image that is not restricted by the optical diffraction limit.

While there is still more work to do to make CLAIRE widely accessible, Ginsberg and her group are moving forward with further refinements for several specific applications.

“We’re interested in non-invasively imaging soft functional materials like the active layers in solar cells and light-emitting devices,” she says. “It is especially true in organics and organic/inorganic hybrids that the morphology of these materials is complex and requires nanoscale resolution to correlate morphological features to functions.”

Ginsberg and her group are also working on the creation of liquid cells for observing biomolecular interactions under physiological conditions. Since electron microscopes can only operate in a high vacuum, as molecules in the air disrupt the electron beam, and since liquids evaporate in high vacuum, aqueous samples must either be freeze-dried or hermetically sealed in special cells.

“We need liquid cells for CLAIRE to study the dynamic organization of light-harvesting proteins in photosynthetic membranes,” Ginsberg says. “We should also be able to perform other studies in membrane biophysics to see how molecules diffuse in complex environments, and we’d like to be able to study molecular recognition at the single molecule level.”