Wednesday Colloquia

Realising the full potential of electron cryomicroscopy

by Prof. Vinothkumar Kutti Raghunath (NCBS-TIFR, Bangalore)

Wednesday, August 5, 2020 from to (Asia/Kolkata)
at Lecture Theatre ( AG-66 and VIA ZOOM )
TIFR and Online through ZOOM
Description
Electrons and electron microscopy have the power to resolve atomic details. However, electron beam-induced movement and radiation damage are some of the factors that limit the resolution that can be achieved for biological specimens. In particular, the radiation damage of biological molecules by electrons requires averaging of multiple molecular images to obtain higher signal to noise ratio and thus higher resolution. During the last few years, there has been enormous technical progress in the structure determination of biological macromolecules by CryoEM, principally due to the introduction of direct electron detectors that have higher signal to noise ratio and to the improvement of the computational algorithms for image processing. Using selected biological molecules, I will describe how these advances result in high-resolution structures of macromolecules and understand their function.