Cryo-EM

Cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) is a rapidly developing technique in the field of structural biology. Exploiting the recent technological and methodological developments, cryo-EM allows now solving structures of biological macromolecular complexes with a near-atomic resolution. In cryo-EM, structural determination does not require large amounts of purified protein and tedious crystallisation trials. On the contrary, it allows working with heterogeneous samples and can simultaneously reveal their structures in different conformational states. This makes cryo-EM technique especially attractive for structural and functional analysis of the protein complexes. Often the results are directly applicable for the structure-based drug design.