Nobel Chemistry Prize winners announced

Three scientists will share this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution.

Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson have all been involved in research culminating in cryo-electron microscopy (EM) since at least the mid-1970s. Cryo-EM simplifies and improves the imaging of biomolecules, allowing scientists to understand chemical processes and also to research pharmaceuticals.

It was first thought electron microscopy could only be used to image dead matter, but in 1990 Henderson generated a 3D image of a protein at atomic resolution, revealing its further potential. Frank was instrumental in ensuring that electron microscopy more generally could be widely used by creating an imaging processing method between 1975 and 1986. Using computer technology he developed a way to merge the minimal information found in the electron microscope’s two-dimensional images to generate high-resolution, three-dimensional maps. This allowed the microscope’s blurry, 2D images to be merged to reveal a sharp 3D structure.

Dubochet added water to electron microscopy – in the early 1980s, he succeeded in vitrifying water. Through this process, water was cooled so rapidly that it solidified in liquid form around a biological sample, enabling the samples to retain their natural shape in the microscope’s vacuum. Before this was achieved, molecules would collapse in a vacuum as water evaporated.

Atomic resolution was achieved in 2013, enabling researchers to produce 3D images of biomolecules. The method has been used on an incredible variety of molecules from proteins that cause antibiotic resistance, to the surface of viruses. Dubochet is based at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, Frank at Columbia University in New York, while Henderson is situated at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge University.