The Division of Electron microscopy at the National Institute for Research in Bacterial Infection started in the early 80s with a Philips state-of-the-art transmission electron microscope. One JEOL JEE-400 high vacuum evaporator and a JEOL HDT400 hydrophilic treatment apparatus were also installed. At the beginning of the new millennium, the division was upgraded to a cryoEM laboratory. To this end, one FEI Tecnai 12 BioTwin transmission electron microscope with a Gatan cryostage, one Leica EM CPC universal cryo-workstation, and one Leica Ultracut UCT ultramicrotome with FC6 cryo attachment were installed. The Division also has one environmental scanning electron microscope ESEM (FEI Quanta 200).

The electron microscope is used primarily for research and occasionally for diagnosis. The techniques in routine use are bacteriophage isolation and characterization, negative-staining analysis, ultramicrotomy, cryo-electron microscopy, three-dimensional image reconstruction, and scanning electron microscopy.

The laboratory completed several projects, including morphological characterization of enteric phages using electron microscopy, confirming the filamentous nature of the RS1-KmΦ phage of Vibrio. cholerae, constructing partial denaturation maps of vibrio phage DNA, and determining the three-dimensional structure of enteric phages using cryo-electron microscopy and single-particle analysis methods. A Salmonella phage was isolated and characterized, used to treat a 24-hour biofilm in food samples, and demonstrate effectiveness in preventing Salmonella typhi from invading mouse liver and spleen tissue, reducing tissue inflammation in animal models.

Histopathological changes caused by different enteric pathogens have been studied by light microscopy. Surface structural changes and in-depth ultra-structural changes are being studied using scanning and transmission electron microscopes. A few of the important enteric pathogens studied so far are V. cholerae, Helicobacter pylori, Shigella and Salmonella.
Some collaborative research was also carried out in the laboratory. Several national workshops on electron microscopy were also organized by this division with great success.