Each year, the Microanalysis Society (MAS) bestows several major awards during the Microscopy & Microanalysis annual meeting. Regrettably, there is never enough time on stage to detail these awardees’ contributions to the science of microanalysis and the Society, which we hope to rectify here and in future articles. The shift of the 2020 M&M meeting to a virtual format meant that our awardees did not receive their accolades on a physical main stage. These recipients were selected for recognition by a variety of mechanisms, of which many Society members may not be aware. For example, the MAS Awards Committee solicits nominations for annual Outstanding Paper Awards from M&M meeting attendees and symposium organizers via a simple webform (https://the-mas.org/mm-outstanding-paper-recommendation/), whereas the Duncumb Award requires a full nomination package from Society members, and other awards are selected solely at the discretion of the MAS President or Council. Additional description of the various MAS awards, including lists of previous award winners, can be found at https://the-mas.org/awards.

Snowflakes are a natural subject for microscopy, but the conditions under which they form, and the minutes-long working time imposed by sublimation, are substantial technical barriers to field microscopy of snow crystals. Building on the work of earlier pioneers, we developed a portable, actively cooled, semi-automated microscope system capable of making z-stacked images of individual snowflakes and small groups of crystal specimens at ultrahigh resolution. Field trials of the system in Alaska and Canada produced encouraging results and also suggested directions for further improvement.

In this work, we investigated the labeling efficiency of hydrophilic (DAPI) and hydrophobic (Nile Red) fluorescent probes using uni- and bi-directional diffusion on porcine liver tissue sections on the order of a few hundred microns in thickness. Bi-directional diffusion significantly enhanced the penetration of probes. Although diffusion most accurately describes the labeling process, we found that after removal of the labeling molecules residual probe molecules in the tissue sections continued to be transported deeper into the tissue resulting in additional tissue constituents being labeled. Our study shows that bi-directional labeling can significantly enhance the labeling of thick tissues for applications in which structural information in three dimensions is needed.

The brain, a lung, a tumor: each contains a complex array of cell types arranged in an intricate spatial pattern that is critical to their role within the tissue. While work is underway to create an atlas of cellular diversity across tissues, traditional methods either have sufficiently high multiplexing capacity but lack spatial context, or they provide spatial information but lack the multiplexing capacity to identify subtle variations in cell type or state. This limitation precludes a comprehensive view across a whole tissue, including rare cells, as they exist within a tissue of interest. Since understanding how the molecular and cellular organization of a biological tissue contributes to its functionality is fundamental to developing treatments that target the cell biology underlying diseased states, improved tools that map biological systems with both high spatial resolution and high multiplexing capacity promise to deliver new, clinically relevant insights into the functional composition of biological systems. The recently developed multiplexed error-robust fluorescence in situ hybridization (MERFISH) method provides information about gene expression at subcellular resolution and reveals cell type, state, and cell-cell interaction by quantifying the expression and exact location of hundreds to thousands of transcripts within intact tissues. MERFISH represents a major advancement toward directly interrogating rich cellular heterogeneity and is being applied to gain insight into the biological complexity within and around us.

Live-cell fluorescence microscopy is an indispensable tool in biomedical and biophysical research, allowing the study of dynamic processes in living systems. Recent developments have given rise to high-end imaging systems capable of live-cell imaging on the nanometer scale. These instrumentation developments have, in turn, increased the demand for enhanced fluorophores to label target proteins within living cells. abberior offers solutions on both fronts. abberior LIVE dyes have higher cell permeability and improved specificity compared to conventional labels, making long-term live-cell imaging at extremely low probe concentrations possible. These low nanomolar working concentrations minimize cell toxic effects. abberior stimulation emission depletion (STED) microscopes offer super-resolution down to ~30 nm with minimal light exposure to the sample. This unique combination takes live-cell imaging to the next level and will make super-resolution imaging of dynamic subcellular processes a routine, easy-to-use visualization method, paving the way for fundamental biological discoveries. At the extreme, minimal emission fluxes (MINFLUX) microscopy offers molecular resolutions of a few nanometers in unprecedented temporal regimes.

Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) offers significant potential for studying chemical changes that occur in a battery electrode at a spatial resolution approaching atomic dimensions, provided a representative specimen can be prepared. The purpose of this paper is to show that it is possible to examine an electrode in the charged condition using TEM, while avoiding major changes in chemistry from specimen preparation. We also demonstrate the power of electron energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS) for phase identification at high spatial resolution. The origin of “fading” of an electrode after repeated charge-discharge cycling is also discussed.