Nobel Prize honors method revealing details of molecules
STOCKHOLM — Three researchers based in the U.S., U.K. and Switzerland won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for developing a way to create exquisitely detailed images of the molecules driving life — a technology that the Nobel committee said allows scientists to visualize molecular processes they had never previously seen.
The $1.1 million prize is shared by Switzerland’s Jacques Dubochet of the University of Lausanne, German-born U.S. citizen Joachim Frank at New York’s Columbia University and Briton Richard Henderson of MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said their method, called cryoelectron microscopy, allows researchers to “freeze biomolecules” mid-movement. That technology is akin to “the Google Earth for molecules,” said American Chemical Society president Allison Campbell.
“This discovery allows the scientist to zoom in down to the fine detail (giving) that fine resolution that you want to have,” she said. “Having all the exquisite detail just gives you a wealth of information about that protein molecule and how it is interacting with its environment.”
Nobel chemistry committee member Heiner Linke added: “It’s the first time that we can see biological molecules in their natural environment and how they actually work together down to the individual atoms.”
The Nobel committee praised the technology for being “decisive for both the basic understanding of life’s chemistry and for the development of pharmaceuticals.” For instance, the academy said the technique was used when scientists began suspecting the Zika virus was causing the epidemic of brain-damaged children in Brazil. Images of the virus allowed researchers to “start searching for potential targets” for Zika drugs.
Just a few years ago, electron microscope images of proteins resembled blobs. Now they can show intricately intertwined strands.
Frank said he was “fully overwhelmed” upon hearing he had won. “I thought the chances of a Nobel Prize were minuscule because there are so many other innovations and discoveries that happen almost every day,” he said.
Henderson said he felt “the three of us have been awarded the prize acting on behalf of the entire field.”
Dubochet’s contribution was to freeze the water in the sample being examined so quickly that it vitrified — forming a kind of glass rather than ice, whose crystalline structure disrupted the electron beam used to make an image.
Frank developed mathematical models to sharpen fuzzy electron microscope images, and Henderson, in 1990, was able to generate a 3-D image of a protein at atom-level resolution.
Dubochet “worked to essentially start it, kicked off the field; he invented this method of making specimens we now use,” Henderson said.