cryo-EM

Cryo-EM (cryo-electron microscopy) is a technique in which a solution of biological molecules such as proteins is flash-frozen in a thin layer of ice, imaged many times with an electron microscope, and computationally combined to reconstruct a three-dimensional structure. It can reveal the structures of molecules that are hard to crystallize.

Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson received the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing it. Because a single sample captures molecules in many shapes, cryo-EM is also used to study protein motion and conformational change, and machine learning is used in its image processing and reconstruction.

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