New Collaboration to Promote Study of the Role of Structural Biology in Disease

A major manufacturer of electron microscopes has joined a cooperative research initiative to combine this method with NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction to accelerate medical discoveries in the fields of infectious diseases and cancer.

The electron microscope manufacturer FEI (Hillsboro, OR, USA) has entered into a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the [US] National Institutes of Health (Bethesda, MD, USA), to create a “Living Lab Structural Biology Center” to promote structural biology research through the integration of cryoelectron microscopy (EM), NMR spectroscopy, and X-ray diffraction (XRD).

The research program, which will be centered on the campus of the [US] National Institutes of Health, will be empowered by FEI's Titan Krios transmission electron microscope (TEM), the world's most powerful commercially-available electron microscope for structural biology.

The collaboration effort will focus on the development of methods and workflows, from sample preparation through data analysis, which combine information from cryo-EM, XRD, and NMR. More...