National Synchrotron to Advance Structural Biology Investigations

The new Cryo EM centre located at Diamond Light Source, one of the most advanced synchrotron light sources in the world, is being equipped with a complete cryo-electron microscopy suite which when used in conjunction with other structural biology techniques will provide new insights into viruses and cellular proteins.Two Titan Krios™ cryo transmission electron microscopes (TEMs), a Scios™ DualBeam™ FIB/SEM (focused ion beam/scanning electron microscope) and a Talos™ cryo-TEM will be installed by FEI.

Professor David Stuart, director for Life Sciences at Diamond Light Source said; “X-ray diffraction (XRD) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) are extremely powerful techniques that can resolve atomic-scale structure, but can only be applied to a subset of biological molecules and complexes. Cryo-EM can resolve structures down to the sub-nanometer, molecular-scale, and can look at just about anything, including large multimolecular complexes. In the simplest sense, integrative structural biology uses cryo-EM to provide the overview, and XRD and NMR to see the details. Locating cryo-EM equipment at the synchrotron gives researchers access to a range of advanced capabilities at the same facility.”

Integrative structural biology is a rapidly-emerging field that combines general methods including TEM. For this process Diamond’s sophisticated computational capabilities are critical for analysing the data from individual techniques and combining these results to obtain 3D structural analysis that spans the spatial scale from atoms to large multimolecular entities.

The new Cryo EM centre for biology, located at Diamond’s Harwell Science and Innovation Campus near Oxford is due to open in 2015. It is being funded by a £15.6 million grant from the Wellcome Trust, the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).