EM ICE is a versatile high-pressure freezing platform for rapid cryo-immobilization of aqueous samples, designed to preserve ultrastructure for downstream cryo-electron microscopy. By combining high-pressure freezing with light and electrical stimulation, it supports experiments that aim to capture dynamic events at the moment they occur.
Key Features
- Preserve native ultrastructure for downstream cryo-EM by rapidly cryo-immobilizing aqueous specimens, helping minimize artifacts and support optimal preservation.
- Improve cryo-fixation with an alcohol-free freezing principle: no alcohol in the chamber supports faster pressure increase and immediate cooling, and leaves no alcohol residue on carrier or specimen.
- Reduce manual handling with automation: “one move” fully automated loading takes the specimen from loading to freezing in 1 second.
- Capture dynamic events by combining stimulation with freezing: supports light or electrical stimulation with high-pressure freezing, including millisecond-precision electrical stimulation and coordinated discharge at the moment of freezing, plus correlation between light pulses and the moment of freezing.
- Cover multiple research areas by pairing HPF with freeze substitution, described for applications including neuroscience, CLEM, cell biology, and developmental biology.
- Support advanced cryo-EM workflows where high-quality frozen samples are a prerequisite, including cryo-electron tomography (Cryo-ET) and on-grid lamella preparation (including waffle freezing).
- Extend into 3D volume EM workflows where high-pressure freezing is described as a starting point for Array Tomography and serial block face imaging.
- Bring the freezer to the sample for live-cell CLEM logistics: described as a mobile, all‑in‑one compact instrument that can be moved on wheels for fast transfer during live-cell CLEM experiments.
- Run consecutive cycles with defined recovery time and onboard storage: described as ~1-minute recovery time and storage organized into three partitions supporting up to nine samples total (3×3), with programmable counts per position and automated sample-storage Dewar refilling.