‘Cool’ method to study molecules
Stockholm: Scientists Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson won the Nobel Chemistry Prize on Wednesday for cryo-electron microscopy, a simpler and better method for imaging tiny, frozen molecules.
Thanks to the international team’s new “cool method”, which uses electron beams to photograph the tiniest structures of cells, “researchers can now routinely produce three-dimensional structures of biomolecules”, the Nobel chemistry committee said.
“Researchers can now freeze biomolecules midmovement and visualise processes they have never previously seen, which is decisive for both the basic understanding of life’s chemistry and for the development of pharmaceuticals,” it added.
The ultra-sensitive imaging method allows molecules to flash-frozen and studied in their natural form, without the need for dyes or fixatives.
It has laid bare neverbefore-seen details of the machinery inside cells, viruses and proteins, and has shed light on enzymes involved in diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
“When researchers began to suspect that the Zika virus was causing the epidemic of brain-damaged newborns in Brazil, they turned to cryo-EM (electron microscopy) to visualise the virus,” the committee said.
Frank, a 77-year-old biochemistry professor at Columbia University in New York, was woken from his sleep when the committee announced the prize in Stockholm, six hours ahead. “There are so many other discoveries every day, I was in a way speechless,” he said via video-conferencing. “It’s wonderful news.”
In the first half of the 20th century, biomolecules — proteins, DNA and RNA — were terra incognita on the map of biochemistry.
Because the powerful electron beam destroys biological material, electron microscopes were long believed to work only when imaging dead matter. But Henderson, now 72, used an electron microscope in 1990.