UC Santa Cruz’s new cryo-electron microscopy facility has a unique structure that makes the technique accessible for local researchers and is attracting international business. Structural biologist…
UC Santa Cruz’s new cryo-electron microscopy facility has a unique structure that makes the technique accessible for local researchers and is attracting international business. Structural biologists recently published the first paper to include data from the facility.
Proteins are in your skin, blood, bones and every other tissue in your body. They run your internal clock, help you to heal, move your muscles, and enable every one of your senses. And they’re very, very small. For reference, the diameter of a human hair is around 100,000 nanometers. The diameter of a single protein is around 5 nanometers.
Enter: the cryo-electron microscope. As its name implies, the technique is cold. Researchers place a tiny drop of water that contains the protein onto a small metal grid 3 millimeters in diameter. They plunge that grid into icy liquid ethane so fast that the water flash freezes into a glassy form of ice, then shoot a beam of electrons through it. The electrons work just like rays of light through a camera lens; they create a 2D picture.
The grant paid for the microscope, but to keep it running, they needed a business plan. Serrão had ideas, and the timing was perfect. “We just got super lucky [Serrão] was looking for a job at the time,” said Jurica. “He’s going to be the reason our facility succeeds.” If they need even higher resolution, they can send their optimized grids to one of three NIH-funded national centers, located in Stanford, Portland and New York City, which house more powerful scopes. “Some people don’t need to go to another institution to polish off their data, some people do,” says Jurica. Time on the national microscopes is free as long as the project is accepted, so doing the screening work at UCSC helps researchers to write strong proposals that are likely to be accepted.
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