After technical maintenance and upgrading, both our Titan Krios miscroscopes are now fully operational. Krios 1 has been fitted with a Gatan K3 bioquantum detector. Krios 2 has been fitted with a Gatan K2 bioquantum detector (and still has Falcon3 detector available).
On July 10 a preprint was released on stabilizing the trimeric spike protein of Sars-CoV-2. This protein constitutes the main focus of most vaccine development efforts. The research for this article was a collaboration between Janssen Vaccines & Prevention BV and NeCEN.
Dr. Sriram Subramaniam (University of British Columbia) recently published a short article on the growth of Cryo-EM, the power of Cryo-EM in the field of structural biology and the important role it serves in SARS-CoV-2 related research.
On June 25 a preprint article has been released on coronavirus replication. Using cryo electron microscopy a molecular pore complex was unveiled which would allow export of RNA to the cytosol. A hexameric assembly of a large viral transmembrane protein was found to form the core of the crown-shaped complex. This coronavirus-specific structure likely plays a critical role in coronavirus replication and thus constitutes a novel drug target.
A collaboration of researchers from the Department of Molecular Biotechnology, the Centre for Microbial Cell Biology from Leiden University and NeCEN published an open access article today in Communications Biology on the teichoic acids that anchor distinct cell wall lamellae in an apically growing bacterium. The cryo-electron tomography was performed at the NeCEN facility.