Dubochet, Frank and Henderson win Nobel Prize for chemistry

October 04, 2017 15:41

The 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry is awarded to Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson.

The trio won the prestigious prize "for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution"

According to Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences press release, "This method has moved biochemistry into a new era."

Electron microscopes were long believed to only be suitable for imaging dead matter, because the powerful electron beam destroys biological material. But in 1990, Richard Henderson succeeded in using an electron microscope to generate a three-dimensional image of a protein at atomic resolution. This breakthrough proved the technologys potential.

Joachim Frank made the technology generally applicable. Between 1975 and 1986 he developed an image processing method in which the electron microscopes fuzzy two dimensional images are analysed and merged to reveal a sharp three-dimensional structure.

Jacques Dubochet added water to electron microscopy. Liquid water evaporates in the electron microscopes vacuum, which makes the biomolecules collapse. In the early 1980s, Dubochet succeeded in vitrifying water he cooled water so rapidly that it solidified in its liquid form around a biological sample, allowing the biomolecules to retain their natural shape even in a vacuum.

Photograph: @NobelPrize/Twitter

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