Nobel prize in chemistry awarded for method to visualise biomolecules
Source: The Guardian
The Nobel prize in chemistry has been awarded to three scientists for developing a technique to produce images of the molecules of life frozen in time.
Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson will receive equal shares of the 9m Swedish kronor (£825,000) prize, which was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on Wednesday.
The technique they developed, called cryo-electron microscopy, has allowed the structure of biomolecules to be studied in high-resolution for the first time, an advance that has transformed the field of biochemistry.
Before the breakthrough, electron microscopes were only suitable for imaging dead matter, because the powerful electron beam destroyed biological material. Henderson, a Scottish scientist and professor at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, succeeded in using one of these microscopes to generate the first three-dimensional image of a protein at atomic resolution.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/oct/04/nobel-prize-in-chemistry-awarded-for-method-to-visualise-biomolecules
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