By means of atomic absorption spectrophotometry, concentrations of more than 2500mgkg-lpb, 150 mgkg -1 Zn, and 320 mgkg -1 Cd could be detected in the intestine tissues of diplopods from a lead and silver smeiter's spoil bank. While only small portions of the ingested lead and cadmium are absorbed in the midgut of these diplopods, the zinc uptake into the midgut epithelium reaches 33.8-37.5% of the zinc content in the food pulp when the animals were contaminated acutely. However, after long-term contamination with zinc, absorption and excretion of this metal balanced one another. Absorbed lead and cadmium are predominantly stored in the midgut cells of the diplopods; unspecific precipitation of heavy metal showed the spherites of the resorptive epithelial cells to be the main accumulation sites. Zinc is for the most part localized in or near the cuticle; electron energy loss spectroscopy and ESI electron spectroscopic imaging, however, showed this metal to be present also in the spherites of the midgut's resorption cells. These spherites are assigned to belong to the 'type A granule' group since (i) they are concentrically structured, (ii) they are shown to contain great amounts of calcium and (iii) copper, a class B metal, could not be detected in these deposits.

High-affinity Ca2(+)-ATPase activity in the optic tectum of the brain of cichlid fish was cytochemically localized using cerium ions to precipitate phosphate. Activation of the enzyme with micromolar instead of millimolar calcium concentrations (i.e., physiological cytoplasmic instead of extracellular concentrations) resulted in intracellular localization of reaction product attached to the cytoplasmic side of plasma membranes and to synaptic vesicles. The plasmalemmal enzyme activity was concentrated in synaptic regions. Synaptic vesicles in some terminals exhibited high amounts of ATPase activity, whereas others were free of reaction product. By use of electron energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS) and electron spectroscopic imaging (ESI) techniques, even small amounts of cerium-containing precipitates could be analyzed and precisely localized. The cytochemical observations are in good agreement with biochemical findings and therefore indicate that the calcium pump of neuronal plasma membranes can be successfully localized.

This study demonstrates the presence of nitrogen, sulfur, chlorine, zinc, and calcium both in mature and in aggregating PEX fibrils of the lens capsule. EFTEM proved to be a highly sensitive method for the microanalytical study of biological material with unknown composition, such as PEX material, at the subcellular level.

A new approach for element microanalysis with energyfiltering transmission electron microscopy (EFTEM) is presented which was accomplished with the CEM 902 electron microscope (Zeiss, Germany). This method is called Jinage-EELS, because it is a synthesis of electron energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS) and electron spectroscopic imaging (ESI). Series of energy-filtered images at increasing energy losses are recorded from one area with a TV camera. In a second step the intensity of selected regions in the image stack is measured with an image analysis system and plotted as a function of the energy loss. Thus many spectra from Merent objects can be calculated from one image series and compared with each other. The spatial resolution of EELS is considerably enhanced, the noise is decreased because many pixels from irregular objects are integrated, and the information from ESI can be analysed as a function of the energy loss.