An important part of the institute’s mission comes from studying cancer’s nanobiology. Jessica Riesterer, Ph.D. – an OHSU staff scientist working with the Knight Cancer Institute – explained that this is a very delicate research area as it requires a level of precision from lab instruments that is not easily achievable.

“There’s a big push to look at how cancer cells are organized with their architecture at the cellular level,” said Dr. Riesterer. “So, we need the highest resolution—at the nanometer level—in order to do that.”

The Challenge

Finding the critical details

OHSU researchers must be able to see the full range of features that make up cancer cells and tissues. However, zooming down to nanometric (one billionth of a meter) level is not an easy task. The team must run various pieces of sophisticated equipment – such as transmission electron microscopes – for days at a time in order to generate the ultra high-resolution atomic images and data sets.

Claudia S. López, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the OHSU School of Medicine and is the Director of the Multiscale Microscopy Core (MMC) and Co-Director of the Pacific Northwest cryoEM Center (PNCC). She is an expert in electron microscopy research and understands the best practices needed to ensure accurate data collection.

The Solution

Clearing through the noise

TMC offers complete environmental solutions designed to provide precision vibration control to enable the most precise measurements. After assessing OHSU’s environment and the problems they had been facing, TMC recommended its STACIS III Active Piezoelectric Cancellation System.

STACIS III continuously measures floor activity, then expands and contracts piezoelectric actuators to cancel out vibration from floor motion in real time. Thanks to STACIS III, the researchers at OHSU experience almost no vibration when generating their data sets, resulting in more accuracy and, in turn, further advancement of their research.

“TMC’s vibration control has allowed us to image at the highest resolution, including the nanoscale,” said Dr. Riesterer.

Learn more about AMETEK TMC Vibration Control.