
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2017 - dbcooper
https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2017/press.html
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indescions_2017
Congrats! Cryo-EM is the tool that basically gave birth to integrative
structural biology. Our understanding of how viruses attach to healthy cells,
or how blastocysts differentiate into stem cells is all contingent upon our
ability to observe these processes in vivo. And as we push ever further down
into the atomic scale, using better electron detectors and more intelligent
Bayesian estimations, many hidden mysteries of cell functioning will soon be
revealed.

For example, seeing the structure and attack vector of the Plasmodium
falciparum parasite that causes severe malaria has led to the design for an
inhibitor.

The cryo-EM structure of the Plasmodium falciparum 20S proteasome and its use
in the fight against malaria.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27286897](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27286897)

Hexahydroquinolines are antimalarial candidates with potent blood-stage and
transmission-blocking activity

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-017-0007-4](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-017-0007-4)

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aswanson
What are some good introductory texts/resources to read to get up to your
level of understanding in these topics? Is this a biochem, virology, molecular
bio area of study?

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indescions_2017
Invaluable for understanding the Central Dogma of molecular biochemistry:

[https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-biology-secret-
life-...](https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-biology-secret-life-
mitx-7-00x-6)

Followed by a daily diet of Nature, Cell, & Science

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aswanson
Much obliged.

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coldcode
As a former chemistry student from way back, this is awesome stuff that was
science-fiction back then. Imaging chemical reactions in mid-flight is one of
those things people have always wanted.

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selimthegrim
Wasn't that done by Herschbach and Lee with molecular beams?

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simonbyrne
The computational problem for solving Cryo-EM structures is an interesting
one. The current state-of-the-art approach is essentially an EM algorithm for
classifying and estimating the orientations of the images, but it utilises a
fairly brute-force approach (and thus quite computationally expensive). There
is probably a lot of room here for further improvements, such as better or
faster approximations, or using different statistical/machine learning
approaches, as well as incorporating more chemical/structural knowledge into
the process.

The software I'm most familiar with is relion, which is open source:
[https://github.com/3dem/relion](https://github.com/3dem/relion)

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kanzure
just the other day i was looking at this cryo-EM playlist, seems relevant now:
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8_xPU5epJdctoHdQjpfH...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8_xPU5epJdctoHdQjpfHmd_z9WvGxK8-)

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Teichopsia
A bit off topic. Say, 5-10 years ago I read about someone winning a nobel
prize for something he did regarding blood. When he was asked in the interview
how he came about the discovery, he replied having imagined himself as that
particular "compound" traveling through the blood stream while on Acid. Later
on I tried searching for that to see who it was but couldn't find it. Now I
wonder if it's true.

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aheilbut
Are you thinking of Kary Mullis?

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Teichopsia
Now I am. Thanks!

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resiros
This is the second nobel price in five years going to protein structure
prediction. Pretty exciting stuff!

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fabian2k
This is not prediction, it's structure determination. Though there is a lot of
computation and modelling involved, it's much more like X-ray crystallography
and NMR than ab initio structure prediction. It's based on actual, measured
data, not on computation alone.

It is very impressive that they managed to get the resolution of the method
into a range comparable to the other conventional methods.

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evolve2017
I wonder if this means that the super resolution microscopy techniques are
also in line for a Nobel...

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dbcooper
Awarded the 2014 prize:

[https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/...](https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2014/)

