Understanding the biological machinery by cryogenic TEM imaging and structure determination

Friday, January 26, 2018 1:00:00 PM EST - 2:00:00 PM EST

Life is composed of four fundamental building blocks: lipids, sugars, nucleic acids, and amino acids. These basic building blocks polymerize and assembly into the living world around us. Historically, understanding how this organic chemistry creates the machinery of life required crystallization and x-ray diffraction methods, or were limited to sizes solvable by NMR spectroscopy. Today, advances in cryogenically preserving biological assemblies and imaging them by Transmission Electron Microscopy are revolutionizing our understanding of these molecular assemblies in near native conditions with spatial resolutions ranging from organismal to near atomic resolutions. This webinar will discuss these advances and why the researchers behind them were recently award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

The webinar is brought to you by: the Nanotechnology Collaborative Infrastructure Southwest and the Nanotechnology Application and Career Knowledge Support Center with financial support from the National Science Foundation.

1. transmission electron microscopy (TEM)
2. Webinar