Nobel for ‘cool’ molecule method
A REVOLUTIONARY technique – dubbed cryo-electron microscopy, which has shed light on the Zika virus and an Alzheimer’s enzyme – earned three scientists the Nobel Chemistry Prize yesterday.
The scientists – Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson – will share the $1.1-million (R15-million) prize money.
Thanks to the international team’s “cool method” – using electron beams to examine the tiniest structures of cells – researchers could now freeze biomolecules mid-movement and visualise processes they had never previously seen, the Nobel chemistry committee said.
It had been decisive for both the basic understanding of life’s chemistry and for the development of pharmaceuticals, it said.
The ultra-sensitive imaging method allows molecules to be flash-frozen and studied in their natural form, without the need for dyes.
It has laid bare never-before-seen details of the tiny protein machines that run all cells.
“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. In the first half of the 20th century, biomolecules – proteins, DNA and RNA – were unknown territory in the biochemistry.
Because the electron beam destroys biological material, electron microscopes were long thought to be useful only to study dead matter.
But Henderson, 72, of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, used one in 1990 to generate a three-dimensional image of a protein at atomic resolution – a groundbreaking discovery which proved the technology’s potential.
Frank, 77, made it widely usable between 1975 and 1986, developing a method to transform the electron microscope’s fuzzy two-dimensional images into sharp, 3-D composites.
Dubochet, now 75, and an honorary professor of biophysics at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, added water and discovered in the 1980s how to cool it so quickly that it solidifies in liquid form around a biological sample, allowing the molecules to retain their shape, even in a vacuum.
The electron microscope’s every nut and bolt have been optimised since these discoveries.
The required atomic resolution was reached in 2013 – and from then on three-dimensional structures of biomolecules could be used .