July 11: A new Tufts University imaging facility is doing something that most microscopy centers in the world cannot: allowing scientists to examine a butterfly wing, a living tissue, or a microchip and reveal their physical structure, molecular chemistry, and elemental composition across every scale, from the macroscale down to the nanoscale – all in only one imaging session.
The Center for Optical Characterization of Organic and Natural Materials (COCOON), an offshoot of the Tufts Silklab, is now available as a resource for academic and industry clients. What sets it apart is not any single instrument, but a coordinated suite of microscopes that work together so that findings at one scale can be directly connected to findings at another, on the same sample, in the same session.
Understanding how a butterfly wing keeps cool in the sunlight, how a drug capsule releases its payload, or how a biomaterial reacts with surrounding tissue requires connecting macro-scale observations to what is happening at the nanometer scale. Until now, doing that meant moving between instruments and facilities, each requiring different ways to prepare samples of materials. Every transfer risked damaging material or losing track of exactly which region of the sample was being examined.
For biological materials, the problem was more acute. Most high-resolution electron microscopy requires operation in vacuum, which evaporates the water that gives living tissues their shape, structure, and function. Chemically fixing or drying the sample is the typical approach, but it alters the very thing researchers are trying to study. COCOON was designed to solve these problems.
From the Whole Sample to the Nanoscale
At the center of COCOON is the most powerful instrument in the suite, a scanning electron microscope capable of providing a topographical map of a surface by resolving features as small as 0.8 nanometers. That’s about the size of a glucose molecule. Its capabilities are enhanced by integrated instruments that map molecules (Raman spectroscopy) and atoms (EDX spectroscopy) present in the material. All three results can be combined into one “color” picture of the material at a specific location—showing not only shape and texture but also the layout and pattern of different molecules and elements.
Other instruments extend reach toward larger and smaller scales, including confocal laser scanning microscopes that can create a sliced image of different depths of a material, analogous to a CAT scan, and an atomic force microscope that can map the surface at near-atomic resolution. All instruments share spatial information with each other, so a region of interest identified at the whole-sample level can be tracked and re-examined all the way down to the nanoscale level without losing its location.
“The advantage we have is that we can correlate information between each microscope,” said Fiorenzo Omenetto, Frank C. Doble Professor of Engineering at Tufts University and director of Silklab. “If we identify a region of interest with an optical microscope, we can examine the same region at the micro and nanoscale.”
Examining Biological and Industrial Materials
For biological materials, COCOON adds a key capability: cryogenic preservation. By rapidly freezing a sample before imaging, the platform locks biological tissues in a state that closely represents how they look and function in nature, leaving water intact and their structure undisturbed. These cryogenic conditions are maintained throughout imaging with different instruments, so structural and molecular data are collected from the same preserved region at the same time. An added benefit is that freezing the sample also reduces damage from the electron beam and laser, so you have time to gather more information.
COCOON was created because the tools researchers needed simply didn’t exist at Tufts, or in most places.
“We needed to know how materials were made and organized, from the nano to the macro scale,” said Giulia Guidetti, research assistant professor and director of COCOON, describing the Silklab’s ongoing work. “But the imaging instrumentation available to us at the time was not good enough, especially for biological materials.”
COCOON’s capabilities go well beyond biological materials. The facility can analyze polymers, adhesives, microchips, batteries, catalysts, and membranes, to name a few, and can even be applied to forensic investigation.
COCOON emphasizes a collaborative service model. Trained scientific staff work closely with clients to design experiments, prepare samples, select imaging strategies, and interpret results, ensuring that data is not only technically rigorous, but also directly useful for the next step in a client’s research or product development.
Instrumentation access is available on an hourly basis, and external clients can also engage the lab for full analysis and consulting services.
“This is not just an instrument. It’s a workflow, and a way of thinking about materials that we believe will open up new research directions,” said Guidetti.
Examining Biological and Industrial Materials
COCOON is a next-generation characterization suite designed for researchers working at the intersection of biology, materials science, and optics. Reach out today for rates, reservations, and other inquiries.
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