About Magnetic Isolation and Concentration cryo-electron microscopy:
- It helps researchers to study samples 100 times more dilute than before.
- It is a technique enabling direct structural analysis of targets captured on magnetic beads, thereby reducing the targets’ concentration requirement to <0.0005 mg/mL.
- Working:
- It uses magnetic beads (50-nm size beads) to hold molecules in place.
- This greatly reduces the amount of protein needed in the initial sample.
- A refined analysis method called Duplicated Selection To Exclude Rubbish (DuSTER) was designed in parallel to help capture the structure of smaller molecules.
- MagIC-cryo-EM and DuSTER will allow scientists to use cryo-EM to examine the structure of proteins which are smaller, challenging to isolate or present in minute quantities inside cells.
- Application: The knowledge gained from these findings could help us better understand a wide range of biological processes.
Key Facts about Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM)
- It is a technique that allows researchers to directly visualize proteins.
- The approach first requires flash-freezing a sample at extremely low temperatures and then sending a beam of electrons through the specimen from several angles.
- The resulting series of two-dimensional images are analysed using advanced algorithms to construct a final three-dimensional protein model.
- Limitations: Despite its power, cryo-EM also has limitations, including requiring very large quantities of protein in the initial sample. The algorithms currently available for Cryo-EM analyses also struggle to determine the structure of smaller molecules.
