Helium Ion Microscopy for the imaging of biological samples

Imaging of biological samples benefits from several unique capabilities of the Helium ion microscope, e.g. charge compensation, large depth of focus, and sequential milling and imaging obtained by combining the different ion sources for investigation of different tissue layers. In this work we investigate the influence of the sample preparation procedures of biological samples on the resulting imaging quality. We tested various fixatives and embedding procedures and investigated the impact of critical point drying. We find that using glutaraldehyde as a fixative combined with critical point drying of the sample preserve the tissue of shrinking and allows imaging the sample with low-current Helium beams at high resolution.