A year ago, Bridget Carragher and Clint Potter’s group broke the so-called three-angstrom barrier for electron microscopy (EM). Prior to their work, so many structures had been solved using EM at 3.4 or 3.5-angstrom resolution that people had started to believe higher resolutions were out of reach with the technology.
"Our group set out to show that EM could do better,” says Carragher, co-Director of the Simons Electron Microscopy Center (SEMC) at the New York Structural Biology Center (NYSBC). “We did things carefully and in a fully automated fashion and got to 2.8 angstroms. That was the first time anyone was able to see water molecules in an EM structure."
Water molecules from an EM structure. Campbell MG, Veesler D, Cheng A, Potter CS, Carragher B. 2.8 A …
