Cryo-EM requires protein samples to be frozen before they are imaged using an electron microscope. This revolutionary technique and its application to structural biology was the focus of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2017 and has contributed to a wave of new structural information for proteins that were difficult or impossible to prepare for X-ray crystallography. As cryo-EM became more popular, new methods and tools arose to improve the technique and make it more efficient. Now, many people are working on the way that samples are prepared so that this is easier to get high resolution structural information from each experiment. Once samples are prepared, there are a number of automated tools that have been developed for picking the frozen particles to be processed. It was while investigating these tools that Ph.D. student Mateusz Olek and his supervisor Peijun Zhang with help from Yuriy Chaban and Donovan Webb, uncovered an unusual problem. Their findings have been published in the journal Structure.
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Source: Phys.org