Overview
- Researchers led by Holger Müller published a Science paper describing a laser phase plate (LPP) that uses an intense continuous‑wave laser to shift the phase of the electron beam and create true phase contrast.
- The LPP was installed on a custom Thermo Fisher Titan Krios and immediately improved image clarity and single‑particle reconstructions for small proteins such as apoferritin and hemoglobin.
- The laser approach recovers information from early movie frames, improves motion correction, and helps particle visualization, 3D classification, and alignment while working with standard defocus ranges and reconstruction workflows.
- Engineers are now addressing practical limits: Biohub is developing a dual‑laser design to cut component wear and reduce optical and electron‑optical aberrations, and the core team is pushing toward imaging proteins near 17 kilodaltons.
- If engineering challenges are solved, the LPP could widen cryo‑EM and cryo‑ET access to many proteins previously too small or crowded to see, speeding structure discovery that affects drug targets and basic biology.