Fig. 3. The VitroJet workflow.

a The device and b the workflow. Sample carriers (up to 12) are introduced in a supply cassette and sample (up to 0.5 µl) in a pipette tip (yellow arrows). The VitroJet automatically processes the cassette by sequentially passing sample carriers through the plasma treatment, sample deposition by pin printing, jet vitrification and finally storing the grid in a cryogenic cassette ready to enter the electron microscope (green arrow). The supply cassette is at room temperature (red), the storage cassette at cryogenic temperature (blue). An animation showing all subsequent steps is shown in Supplementary Movie 5.