Recorded, Thursday, November 16, 2017
Technical and methodological advances in single-particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) have expanded the technique into a resolution regime that was previously only attainable by X-ray crystallography. Although single-particle cryo-EM has proven to be a useful technique for determining the structures of biomedically relevant molecules at near-atomic resolution, nearly 98% of the structures resolved to better than 4 Å resolution have been determined using 300 kV transmission electron microscopes (TEMs). This webinar will demonstrate that it is possible to obtain cryo-EM reconstructions of macromolecular complexes at a range of sizes to better than 3 Å resolution using a 200 kV TEM. We will show that these structures are of sufficient quality to unambiguously assign amino acid rotameric conformations and identify ordered water molecules, features previously thought to be resolvable using only TEMs operating at 300 kV.
In this webcast, you will learn:
Dr. Mark Herzik, a Helen Hay Whitney Foundation postdoctoral fellow at The Scripps Research Institute, employs cryo-EM to elucidate structures of macromolecular complexes implicated in neurodegenerative diseases or chronic pain. He has aided development of novel strategies for collecting and processing high-resolution cryo-EM data and validation of generated atomic models.