US Patent Issued to ION DX on Sept. 8 for "Apparatus and methods for depositing ions onto a surface" (California Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Sept. 8 -- United States Patent no. 12,730,041, issued on Sept. 8, was assigned to ION DX INC. (Monterey, Calif.).

"Apparatus and methods for depositing ions onto a surface" was invented by W. Henry Benner (Carmel, Calif.) and Ben Aguilar (Monterey, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Apparatus and methods are described for preparing samples for examination by cryo-electron microscopy. Molecules of interest, such as protein molecules in a solution, are electrosprayed and converted to singly-charged gas-phase ions. Particular conformation(s) of the protein ions are selected by using an ion mobility filter and deposited onto a cryo-EM grid at sub-eV kinetic energy for the pur...