ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2014
Volta potential phase plate for in-focus phase contrast transmission electron microscopy.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 193 papers.
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Who cites it
193 citing papers in PubMed, 514 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Evaluating the Volta phase plate for improved tomogram alignment in cryo-electron tomography.IUCrJ · 2026Article
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- Cryogenic electron tomography by the numbers: Charting underexplored lineages in structural cell biology.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
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- Biological Breakthroughs and Drug Discovery Revolution via Cryo-Electron Microscopy of Membrane Proteins.Membranes · 2025Review
- Neuronal synaptic architecture revealed by cryo-correlative light and electron microscopy.Biophysics reports · 2025Article
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- Nanoscale analysis of human G1 and metaphase chromatin in situ.The EMBO journal · 2025Article
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- Cryo-electron tomography of eel sperm flagella reveals a molecular "minimum system" for motile cilia.Molecular biology of the cell · 2025Article
- Structural glycobiology - from enzymes to organelles.Biochemical Society transactions · 2025Review
- Visualizing the virus world inside the cell by cryo-electron tomography.Journal of virology · 2024Review
- ARL3 GTPases facilitate ODA16 unloading from IFT in motile cilia.Science advances · 2024Article
- Cryo-EM phase-plate images reveal unexpected levels of apparent specimen damage.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Toxoplasma gondii rhoptry discharge factor 3 is essential for invasion and microtubule-associated vesicle biogenesis.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Nanoscale architecture of synaptic vesicles and scaffolding complexes revealed by cryo-electron tomography.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
133 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We describe a phase plate for transmission electron microscopy taking advantage of a hitherto-unknown phenomenon, namely a beam-induced Volta potential on the surface of a continuous thin film. The Volta potential is negative, indicating that it is not caused by beam-induced electrostatic charging. The film must be heated to ∼ 200 °C to prevent contamination and enable the Volta potential effect. The phase shift is created "on the fly" by the central diffraction beam eliminating the need for precise phase plate alignment. Images acquired with the Volta phase plate (VPP) show higher contrast and unlike Zernike phase plate images no fringing artifacts. Following installation into the microscope, the VPP has an initial settling time of about a week after which the phase shift behavior becomes stable. The VPP has a long service life and has been used for more than 6 mo without noticeable degradation in performance. The mechanism underlying the VPP is the same as the one responsible for the degradation over time of the performance of thin-film Zernike phase plates, but in the VPP it is used in a constructive way. The exact physics and/or chemistry behind the process causing the Volta potential are not fully understood, but experimental evidence suggests that radiation-induced surface modification combined with a chemical equilibrium between the surface and residual gases in the vacuum play an important role.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.