Biophysical Society Thematic Meeting - November 16-20, 2015

Biophysics in the Understanding, Diagnosis, and Treatment of Infectious Diseases Speaker Abstracts

The Cryo-EM Revolution: Applications to Biology and Medicine Sriram Subramaniam . NCI/NIH, Bethesda, USA.

Recent breakthroughs in the field of cryo-electron microscopy provide new prospects for determination of the structures of a variety of macromolecular assemblies and small dynamic protein complexes that are not amenable to analysis by X-ray crystallography or NMR spectroscopy. In addition, advances in technologies for imaging whole cells and tissues in 3D at high resolution have opened up new vistas for 3D structural imaging. I will review emerging opportunities in molecular and cellular imaging that are enabled with these developments, and discuss applications to cancer research and infectious disease in the coming decade. Main points: • Cryo-EM, electron tomography and related methods in 3D electron microscopy provide revolutionary new opportunities for bridging key imaging gaps in biology. • Advances in correlative light and electron microscopic imaging enable simultaneous imaging of the “needle” and the “haystack” of cellular architecture. • Advances in electron tomography and subvolume averaging are providing new and important insights into the structure and mechanism of neutralization of enveloped viruses such as HIV, influenza and Ebola. • Advances in cryo-EM technology enable determination of structures of protein complexes and membrane proteins at near-atomic resolution, and offer unprecedented opportunities for accelerating drug discovery.

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