生命学院学术报告

Title：From Nanometers to Ångströms: Cryoelectron Microscopy in Structural Biology

Speaker: Jiansen Jiang

Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics

University of California, Los Angeles

Time: 13:00-14:00 PM, May 29, 2015 (Fri.)

Venue: Rm. 411, New Life Sciences Building

In the last few years, cryoelectron microscopy (cryoEM) has emerged as a novel approach for structural biology. Technical advancements have made cryoEM capable of solving atomic-resolution structures of a wide range of biological samples from viruses to small protein complexes. A unique advantage of cryoEM is that it reconstructs high-resolution 3-dimentional structures from images of dispersed particles without the need of crystallization or isotope labeling, which makes it an irreplaceable technology for some biological samples that are difficult to isolate or crystallize, e.g., protein complexes and membrane proteins. In this talk I will present the application of cryoEM on two projects that are challenging for structural biology: (1) telomerase, a specialized ribonucleoproetin complex that synthesizes telomeric DNA repeats at the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes; (2) anthrax toxin protective antigen (PA) pore, a protein translocation channel that spans the endosomal membrane to inject the other two components of anthrax toxin, lethal factor and edema factor, into the cytosol for killing the target cells.

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