Revealing the inner workings of cells with cryo-EM and cryo-ET

Our Assistant Editor, Aisha Al-Janabi, discusses the recent applications of cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) and cryogenic electron tomography (cryo-ET) to uncover how cells function, as well as how AI is being used to streamline these techniques.   In 2017, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Jacques Dubochet (University of Lausanne; Switzerland), Joachim Frank (Columbia University; NY, USA) and Richard Henderson (MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology; Cambridge, UK) for the development of cryo-EM, a technique that is able to visualize cellular processes and mechanisms at a resolution that was previously not possible. Cryo-ET is a related and emerging technique, which...