[3dem] Vitrobot humidifier problem

[Jason Kaelber]

Artemis, there are many things that could cause this problem. One of the quickest things to try is swap the water tank with a spare or one from another unit. Also try swapping the cable that connects the tank to the unit.I have seen both these parts go bad on a Mark IV and give an "empty" error. If it is a board you are SOL until you get parts from FEI ThermoFisher.


In the meantime, you can soak two Kimwipes and paste them to the chamber walls, this should keep your humidity high enough to get good ice if you are patient. When they get dry during freezing, you can put a squirt bottle into the port where you would pipette specimen and spray it a bit. I can vouch for having solved at least one atomic structure under such conditions.


Best of luck

Jason


--
J T Kaelber, PhD
Director, Rutgers New Jersey CryoEM/CryoET Core Facility
Institute for Quantitative Biomedicine
174 Frelinghuysen Rd
Piscataway, NJ 08854
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.ncmir.ucsd.edu/pipermail/3dem/attachments/20180423/89f3b3e6/attachment.html>