4 ms·
Oh please, this philosophical stuff is unnecessary. Cyro-EM is about a decade old and is just an alternative to X-Ray Crystallography for elucidating the struct
by TomJansen 6y ago
Oh please, this philosophical stuff is unnecessary. Cyro-EM is about a decade old and is just an alternative to X-Ray Crystallography for elucidating the structures of proteins. This article describes a way to improve the resolution of Cyro-EM, matching it to X-Ray Crystallography. The biggest bottleneck of X-Ray Crystallography is the production of protein crystals which is not necessary with Cyro-EM.
- twic 6y agoIt's unbelievable how cryo-EM has come on. When i was a student, it was an also-ran behind crystallography and NMR, something that a few weird groups used to study a few special cases. Now you have to wonder if there's any point doing crystallography at all! I still like NMR, because you're looking at proteins in solution. But if the freezing is good in cryo-EM, maybe even that becomes moot.
- natechols 6y agoIt's especially shocking how many crystallographers have switched over - when I started, the ribosome crystal structures were the latest heroic achievement, but now nobody would waste time trying to crystallize ribosomes.
- thereisnospork 6y agoI'm not sure if it applies to proteins, but for smaller molecules there seemed to be some really interesting results a few years ago about using MOF's to adsorb analytes in a spatially repeating manner so x-ray diffraction techniques could be used without crystallization. Haven't followed closely enough to know if anything is panning out though.