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  • TECHNOLOGY FEATURE

Cryo-electron microscopy shapes up

As the imaging technique produces ever-sharper protein structures, researchers are racing to develop tools to assess how accurate they are.
  1. Monya Baker
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Once derided as ‘blobology’ for its blurry images, cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) is now churning out high-resolution structures of everything from virus particles to enzymes. The number of cryo-EM images uploaded to the Electron Microscopy Data Bank (EMDB) has boomed from just 8 in 2002 to 1,106 last year — the same year the technique won its developers the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

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Nature 561, 565-567 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-06791-6

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