Hummingbird Scientific offers a sealed-cell liquid holder for static liquid applications. Once prepared, the sample is enclosed within a microfluidic liquid cell in the holder tip and separated from the vacuum of the TEM via a patented sealing mechanism. This tip can be paired with Hummingbird Scientific’s wide range of liquid-cell chip configurations, each aimed at a specific set of experimental requirements.

The continuous-flow and dual-flow configurations both also support static-liquid experiments for researchers interested in maximizing experimental flexibility.

Growing and imaging micelle assembly

The mechanism of micelle growth and assembly has been a subject of much investigations. There are several theories explaining the assembly process of micelle in liquid such as unimer insertion, fusion, fission, complete micelle disassembly and reassembly, or nucleation-elongation. The researchers led by Northwestern University used in-situ liquid cell transmission electron microscopy to monitor the motion and evolution of individual micelles in real time with nanometer spatial resolution. This liquid platform allowed them to observe the diffusion behavior, fusion events and micelle-micelle interaction in solution. This direct observation of micelle interaction in solution opens up a new avenue to test the evolution of soft matter assemblies in unconstrained liquid medium.

Reference: Nathan C. Gianneschi et al. Directly Observing Micelle Fusion and Growth in Solution by Liquid-Cell Transmission Electron Microscopy. Journal of the American Chemical Society (2018). Abstract