Digital Commons Network^™

Structure Determination By Single-Particle Cryo-Electron Microscopy: Only The Sky (And Intrinsic Disorder) Is The Limit, Emeka Nwanochie, Vladimir N. Uversky

Molecular Medicine Faculty Publications

Traditionally, X-ray crystallography and NMR spectroscopy represent major workhorses of structural biologists, with the lion share of protein structures reported in protein data bank (PDB) being generated by these powerful techniques. Despite their wide utilization in protein structure determination, these two techniques have logical limitations, with X-ray crystallography being unsuitable for the analysis of highly dynamic structures and with NMR spectroscopy being restricted to the analysis of relatively small proteins. In recent years, we have witnessed an explosive development of the techniques based on Cryo-electron microscopy (Cryo-EM) for structural characterization of biological molecules. In fact, single-particle Cryo-EM is a special …