back to article Biochem boffins win the Nobel Prize for cryo-electron microscopy

The 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to a trio of researchers that have developed a new technique that captures three dimensional images of biological molecules. Jacques Dubochet, an honorary professor at the Swiss University of Lausanne, Joachim Frank, a professor at New York's Columbia University and Richard …

  1. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Thumb Up

    "a specimen of amorphous ice,"

    Which sounds pretty astonishing all on its own, as it implies you have less of a signal from the solvent (water) to remove before you get to the unscrambling the data from the proteins .

    Impressive stuff.

    And £900k buys a fair amount of rollmop Herring as well.

    1. frank ly

      Re: "a specimen of amorphous ice,"

      Yes, the water freezes so fast that it doesn't have time to form crystals. It's a bit like glass, a supercooled liquid.

      1. Chemist

        Re: "a specimen of amorphous ice,"

        "Yes, the water freezes so fast that it doesn't have time to form crystals. It's a bit like glass, a supercooled liquid."

        Water around proteins ( or indeed any non-polar/semi-polar material) is in a strange state anyway.

  2. werdsmith Silver badge

    Look up some of the images they've made, impressive.

    Most of the research money is in the US so any Nobel outside the US is special so well done to the Cambridge facility and another Nobel Prize for a Scottish scientist, and to the work in Switzerland too.

  3. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken
  4. Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
    Pint

    We DO live in interesting times!

    (in a good way, in some sense at least)

    Great boffinry, and a well-deserved prize! I'll raise a glass to that!

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Boffin wars

    If you want to start a boffin pissing context, ask what the kilovoltage is. 200 kV is ok but the big guns have got 300 kV machines donchaknow. And it needs a fancy vibration proof lab to work in, not to mention liquid ethane freezing systems for the samples, so you're looking at £M to get it going.

    There is an IT angle too. The contrast of the protein signal against the water is very low so you need to collect hundreds or thousands of images and then reconstruct your particle structures, so its a HPC job.

    1. Korev Silver badge
      Boffin

      Re: Boffin wars

      Yep, I believe the lab at the LMB has a 2.5k core cluster dedicated to it. (This was a couple of years ago that I heard this, they may have expanded since.

      Nvidia have ported some of the key codes to GPU, we stuck a load of GPUs in for our CryoEM scientists and a PB or so of Lustre for scratch.

  6. lnLog

    really?

    "It’s particularly useful for seeing proteins, many of which are less the width of human hair"

    Sorry?, what protien molecules are equal or larger than a human hair?

    1. M. Poolman

      Re: really?

      Beat me to it!

      Dimensions of proteins are at the nm level, human hair is about 100 um: a difference in scale about 10^5! C'mon el Reg. we expect better of you!

      1. Korev Silver badge

        Re: really?

        "C'mon el Reg. we expect better of you!"

        Especially as they have their own set of superior units...

  7. ravenviz Silver badge

    RE: more effective drugs

    Cheech & Chong will be most pleased!

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