Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of California San Francisco, CA 94143, United States; Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of California San Francisco, CA 94143, United States.
Curr Opin Struct Biol. 2018 Oct;52:58-63. doi: 10.1016/j.sbi.2018.08.008. Epub 2018 Sep 13.
In the past few years, significant technological breakthroughs in single particle cryo-electron microscopy enabled a 'resolution revolution' of this technique. It also changed structural biology in an unprecedented way. For many biological macromolecules, obtaining well-ordered crystals of suitable size is no longer a prerequisite for determining their atomic structures. One of the most impacted areas is the structural biology of integral membrane proteins. New structures are now determined at a rapid pace. Despite these advances, further technological developments are still required to overcome new technical challenges that face membrane protein structural biology. In this review, I attempt to discuss some of these challenges.
在过去的几年中,单颗粒冷冻电子显微镜技术的重大突破引发了该技术的“分辨率革命”。它也以前所未有的方式改变了结构生物学。对于许多生物大分子来说,获得具有合适大小的有序晶体不再是确定其原子结构的前提条件。受影响最大的领域之一是完整膜蛋白的结构生物学。新结构现在正在快速确定。尽管取得了这些进展,但仍需要进一步的技术发展来克服膜蛋白结构生物学面临的新技术挑战。在这篇综述中,我试图讨论其中的一些挑战。