If we have to take SEM image of single wool fibre, do we need to mount it on silicon wafer? Should the wafer along with the fiber be cleaned using acetone before taking SEM image? We have done plasma treatment which has generated nano-scale features on wool surface. Will morphology get affected by cleaning process?
Fiber should have been cleaned BEFORE treatment.
Do not clean after treatment if small unstable surface features are of interest for you.
Silicon waters are usually clean, but if it was collecting dust somewhere or was touched with fingers it should be cleaned. Silicon is not a mandatory, you can use glass or smooth plastic also; of course they should be clean.
Dear Nisha,
You can easily fix the fibre on the carrier for SEM using double sided adhesive tape. Be careful with solvent extraction of wool since it may alter the surface, due to removal of surface adhering lipids. Alternatively to the conventional SEM-carrier you can use a slit carrier enabling fixation of the fibre outside of the slit area. This helps to avoid influences on the pictures by the tape.
Do you use normal SEM or FE-SEM? Application of SEM after normal (mild) plasma treatment will possibly show no differences to the untreated fibre due to limited resolution. Therefore I would prefer FE-SEM or AFM.
In addition I would like to remark that analysing individual fibres bears the danger of misinterpretation. This is due to possible differences in the appearance of the individual fibres of natural origin.
In case you would like to avoid comprehensive statistical investigations, I would suggest to try AFM of the same position of the fibre before and after plasma treatment.
Best regards.
Helga
If you clean wool with aceton before, as Vladimir Dusevich recomended, you will probably remove part of the natural lipids (lanolin) and also affect the proteins (collagen, fibroin, keratin) by breaking hydrogen bonds and extracting bound water. After, you may loose the information on the surface changes induced by plasma treatment. It may be better to try using a mild detergent such as a non-ionic detergent, then abundant washing with deionized water and drying in dust-free environment. For SEM you can cover with a conductive thin layer of carbon. For TEM you can try negative staining.
Yes, you are going to extract surface adhering lipids by treatment with acetone. However, internal lipds and especially proteinaceous compounds mainly remained unaffected by acetone. That is why acetone was recommended as a substitute for dichloromethane in determination the residual amount of external lipids. Other solvents are much more destructive than acetone.
The danger of modifying the plasma treated surface exists with all post-treatments which also includes treatment with non-ionic detergents. With water all plasma-induced (oxidised) soluble materials will be removed.
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