Advances in cryo-EM and ED with a cold-field emission beam and energy filtration —Refinements of the CRYO ARM 300 system in RIKEN SPring-8 center—

We have designed and evaluated a cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) system for higher-resolution single particle analysis and high-precision electron 3D crystallography. The system comprises a JEOL CRYO ARM 300 electron microscope—the first machine of this model—and a direct detection device camera, a scintillator-coupled camera, GPU clusters connected with a camera control computer and software for automated-data collection and efficient and accurate operation. The microscope provides parallel illumination of a highly coherent 300-kV electron beam to a sample from a cold-field emission gun and filters out energy-loss electrons through the sample with an in-column energy filter. The gun and filter are highly effective in improving imaging and diffraction, respectively, and have provided high quality data since July 2018. We here report on the characteristics of the cryo-EM system, updates, our progress and future plan for running such cryo-EM machines in RIKEN SPring-8 Center.