We have successfully vitrified apoferritin in own Vitrobot Mark 4. Loading the microscope and starting EPU yesterday evening ended up with an acquisition of ~300 high-resolution images from a single gridsquare!
First of all, we are able to demonstrate the full preparation and protocol in-house. This is very important, proving the independence of the site for all steps of cryo-EM imaging! Below is a screenshot after acquisition of the first image from the series of ~300 of them.
In the images below, we can see iterating the defocus worked, and we estimate resolution at ~3 Angstroms; We can also see that Warp (http://www.warpem.com/) has efficiently performed CTF correction and motion corrections of the frames that we acquired with our Falcon direct detector.
Finally, above, you can see an example image at very low defocus, where particles of apoferritin are nicely distributed in vitreous ice. With this test, we eagerly now start analyzing the data to benchmark the resolution that we can get from our newly acquired instrument!