Leica suite las ez software

Polarized light microscopy was carried out by using a Leica DM 2000 optical microscope under polarized light conditions (Leica Microsystems, Heerbrugg, Switzerland). A small portion of gel was placed on a glass slide, covered with a cover slide and observed at 20 °C. Images were taken at 200× magnification using a Leica EC3 digital camera and elaborated by the Leica Suite Las EZ software (Leica Microsystems, Heerbrugg, Switzerland).

Samples were observed at room temperature using a Leica DM 2000 optical microscope (Leica Microsystems, Heerburg, Switzerland). The images were taken at 200Xmagnification using a Leica EC3 digital camera and elaborated with the Leica Suite Las EZ software (Leica Microsystems, Heerburg, Switzerland).
For scanning electron microscopy, samples were mounted on aluminium sample holders and sputter coated with 10 nm of gold using a Sputter Coater 108 auto (Cressington Scientific Instruments, Watford, United Kingdom). The aluminium holder was transferred to the SEM unit (EVO 40XVP, Carl Zeiss, Milan, Italy), which was at ambient temperature and under vacuum. Samples were imaged using an acceleration voltage of 20 kV and SmartSEM v. 5.09 (Carl Zeiss, Milan, Italy) application software was used to capture images of the samples. Images were taken at 1000X magnification and saved in tiff format resulting in 1696 x 2048 pixels.