The Current Revolution in Cryo-EM

Abstract

Structural biology is the study of the molecular architecture of proteins and nucleic acids, which are the basis for all life forms. Structural biology came into its own as a field during the 1950s when the atomic structures of DNA (1) and several globular proteins (2) were solved. Knowledge of these structures alone is not enough to understand their functions, but it has become clear that a detailed mechanistic picture of function is not possible without structural information. Studying structure can reveal how molecules have evolved, and this type of insight would otherwise be lost by looking at only the molecule’s sequence.