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Review
. 2016 Oct:40:128-135.
doi: 10.1016/j.sbi.2016.09.007. Epub 2016 Oct 1.

MicroED opens a new era for biological structure determination

Brent L Nannenga  1 , Tamir Gonen  2
Affiliations
Review

MicroED opens a new era for biological structure determination

Brent L Nannenga et al. Curr Opin Struct Biol. 2016 Oct.

Abstract

In 2013 we unveiled the cryo-electron microscopy (CryoEM) method of MicroED, or three-dimensional (3D) electron diffraction of microscopic crystals. Here tiny 3D crystals of biological material are used in an electron microscope for diffraction data collection under cryogenic conditions. The data is indexed, integrated, merged and scaled using standard X-ray crystallography software to determine structures at atomic resolution. In this review we provide an overview of the MicroED method and compare it with other CryoEM methods.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Example structures determined from MicroED. Structures are shown along with their PDB ID, resolution, full model (left) and representative region of the model and density map (right).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Crystals from the toxic core of α-synuclein. The crystals used to determine the α-synuclein structure were much too small to be seen by light microscopy (a). However, when visualized within the TEM many extremely small microcrystals could be seen (b), which diffracted to approximately 1.4 Å (c). Source: Adapted from Ref. [46••].
Figure 3
Figure 3
Flow diagram for MicroED data collection protocol. Source: Adapted from Ref. [47•].
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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