冷冻电镜单颗粒技术解析生物大分子结构综述

A brief introduction to single-particle cryo-EM of biological macromolecules

冷冻电镜单颗粒技术是从20世纪80年代发展起来的结构生物学新技术,特别是最近几年,由于高分辨成像设备的应用以及图像处理方法的改进,该领域取得了革命性的技术突破,分辨率达到原子水平,迅速发展成为结构生物学新的主流研究技术,尤其适合于研究生物大分子复合物的结构。简述了冷冻电镜单颗粒技术解析生物大分子结构的技术流程、最新技术进步以及未来发展方向。

Single-particle cryo-electron microscopy （cryo-EM） emerged as a tool to study structures of biological macromolecules （es- pecially large complexes） -30 years ago. Recently, due to the newly development of high-resolution imaging device and image pro- cessing methods, huge improvement in resolution has been achieved by cryo-EM single particle analysis. Nowadays it is possible to es- tablish atomic or near-atomic structure models of lots of biological maeromolecules with cryo-EM 3D reconstruction. As a result of this so-called revolutionary breakthrough, cryo-EM has been developing into a mainstream technique of structural biology in the last few years. This work introduces cryo-EM single-particle analysis of biological macromolecules and the new breakthrough in brief, and the future development is discussed as well.