Sunday, February 16, 2020

Revolutionary cryo-EM is taking over structural biology

Amazing stuff! Microscopy has advanced tremendously over the last 20-30 years!

"A revolutionary technique for determining the 3D shape of proteins is booming. Last week, a database that collects protein and other molecular structures determined by cryo-electron microscopy, or cryo-EM, acquired its 10,000th entry. ... For decades, structural biologists preferred to use X-ray crystallography [which was e.g. used to discover the helix geometry of DNA], ... , but it’s not easy to use with all proteins ... Breakthroughs in hardware and software in 2012–13 produced more sensitive electron microscopes and sophisticated software for transforming the images they captured into sharper molecular structures"

Revolutionary cryo-EM is taking over structural biology: The number of protein structures being determined by cryo-electron microscopy is growing at an explosive rate.

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