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Cryo-electron microscopy (CryoEM) is a powerful and increasingly important technique in structural biology, allowing scientists to visualize the intricate details of biomolecules at near-atomic resolution. Unlike traditional electron microscopy, which requires specimens to be fixed, stained, and dehydrated, CryoEM involves rapidly freezing biological samples to preserve their native structure in a vitreous ice layer. This process minimizes damage and artifacts, enabling the observation of molecules in a state that closely resembles their natural environment. 

However, preparing samples and collecting CryoEM data often presents some challenges. Furthermore, CryoEM generates vast amounts of data, requiring sophisticated computational tools and significant processing power to reconstruct high-resolution structures from the collected images.

This 2-day, 2-part webinar, will address:

• Tips for overcoming common challenges in CryoEM sample preparation
• Guidance on image alignment, particle picking, and three-dimensional reconstruction
• Generating 3D CryoEM density maps
• Atomic modeling made easy: new tools to enhance the process

Speaker

• Thomas Klose, PhD - Technical Director, Cryo-EM Facility, Purdue University
• Daisuke Kihara - Professor, Dept of Biological Sciences and Dept of Computer Science, Purdue University

About the Speakers

• Thomas Klose holds a Diploma and a PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Halle-Wittenberg, where he also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Genetics. Following this, he pursued further postdoctoral research in Structural Virology at Purdue University under the guidance of Michael Rossmann, eventually becoming a Research Scientist in the same field. He now serves as the Technical Director of the Purdue Cryo-EM Facility. With over a decade of experience in cryo-EM techniques and more than 70 publications, many of which are collaborative works related to cryo-EM, he has established a robust background in this area of research.

• Daisuke Kihara is a full professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA. He received a B.S. degree from the University of Tokyo, Japan in 1994 and a Ph.D. degree from Kyoto University, Japan in 1999. After studying as a postdoctoral researcher, he joined Purdue University in 2003 and was promoted to full professor in 2014. He has been working on algorithm and software development in broad topics in protein bioinformatics including molecular structure modeling from cryo-electron microscopy maps, protein-protein docking, protein tertiary structure prediction, protein function prediction, and computational drug design. He has published over 230 research articles. He was named a University Faculty Scholar by Purdue University in 2013. In 2021, he was elected as a AIMBE (The American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering) Fellow.