The Annual Krebs Krebs Lecture
The University welcomed 400
students, staff, alumni and members of the public to the Annual Krebs Lecture
on Tuesday 24 April.
The guest speaker for the evening
was the 2017 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, Dr Richard Henderson, FRS
FMedSci. Dr Henderson is a molecular biologist, biophysicist and a
pioneer in the field of electron microscopy of biological molecules.
Dr Henderson’s lecture discussed the increasing power of cryoEM for macromolecular
structure determination.
In
the last few years, single particle electron cryomicroscopy (cryoEM) has
experienced a quantum leap in its capability, due to improved electron
microscopes, better detectors and better software, and this is revolutionising
structural biology. Using the technique invented by Jacques Dubochet and his
colleagues, a thin film containing a suspension of the macromolecules of
interest is plunge-frozen into liquid ethane at liquid nitrogen temperature,
creating a frozen sample in which individual images of the structures can be
seen in many different orientations. Subsequent computer-based image analysis
is used to determine the three-dimensional structure, frequently at near-atomic
resolution. Dr Henderson described some recent results and discussed the
remaining barriers to progress.
The
lecture elucidated that CryoEM is already a very powerful method, but there are
still many improvements that can be made before the approach reaches its
theoretical limits.