Slashdot Mirror
Electron Microscopes Close To Imaging Individual Atoms
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Science: Today's digital photos are far more vivid than just a few years ago, thanks to a steady stream of advances in optics, detectors, and software. Similar advances have also improved the ability of machines called cryo-electron microscopes (cryo-EMs) to see the Lilliputian world of atoms and molecules. Now, researchers report that they've created the highest ever resolution cryo-EM image, revealing a druglike molecule bound to its protein target at near atomic resolution. The resolution is so sharp that it rivals images produced by x-ray crystallography, long the gold standard for mapping the atomic contours of proteins. This newfound success is likely to dramatically help drugmakers design novel medicines for a wide variety of conditions.
Other than the obvious loss of information, I'd be interested in knowing what pitfalls come up that are specific to this case. To make things a little more concrete, take the case of a GPCR dopamine receptor. Supposedly dopamine (or one of a variety of drugs) interacts with this receptor in such a way that a different region changes conformation which in turn alters the conformation of a G-protein so that it binds GTP. This all seems to require very specific protein conformations and I can see how observing the average of many could be misleading.