{"id":180917,"date":"2024-01-19T16:24:46","date_gmt":"2024-01-19T22:24:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/01\/cheaper-microscope-could-bring-protein-mapping-technique-to-the-masses"},"modified":"2024-01-19T16:24:46","modified_gmt":"2024-01-19T22:24:46","slug":"cheaper-microscope-could-bring-protein-mapping-technique-to-the-masses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/01\/cheaper-microscope-could-bring-protein-mapping-technique-to-the-masses","title":{"rendered":"Cheaper microscope could bring protein mapping technique to the masses"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/cheaper-microscope-could-bring-protein-mapping-technique-to-the-masses3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Talk to any structural biologist, and they\u2019ll tell you how a cool new method is taking over their field. By flash freezing proteins and bombarding them with electrons, cryo\u2013electron microscopy (cryo-EM) can map protein shapes with near-atomic resolution, offering clues to their function and revealing bumps and valleys that drug developers can target. The technique can catch wriggly proteins in multiple configurations, and it can even capture those that have been off-limits to traditional x-ray analysis because they stubbornly resist being crystallized. Many researchers expect cryo-EM will surpass x-ray crystallography in the number of new protein structures solved next year.<\/p>\n<p>Yet for all its charms, cryo-EM has flaws: The freezing process is finicky, and the microscopes are expensive. High-end machines can cost more than $5 million to buy, about as much to install, and hundreds of thousands per year to operate and maintain. Many U.S. states\u2014and countries\u2014don\u2019t have a single cryo-EM microscope. \u201cThe haves and have-nots is what it is right now,\u201d says Rakhi Rajan, a structural biologist at the University of Oklahoma, which currently lacks one.<\/p>\n<p>Researchers at the Medical Research Council\u2019s Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) have been working to democratize the field. Today, in the, the U.K. team describes cobbling together a prototype cryo-EM microscope that has solved its first structures. The machine\u2014what LMB physicist Chris Russo calls a \u201ccheap little hatchback\u201d rather than a \u201cFerrari\u201d\u2014could rival high-end machines in capabilities for one-tenth of the cost.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Talk to any structural biologist, and they\u2019ll tell you how a cool new method is taking over their field. By flash freezing proteins and bombarding them with electrons, cryo\u2013electron microscopy (cryo-EM) can map protein shapes with near-atomic resolution, offering clues to their function and revealing bumps and valleys that drug developers can target. The technique [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":367,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-180917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/367"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180917"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180917\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}