{"id":549,"date":"2021-04-19T19:00:36","date_gmt":"2021-04-19T19:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.acceleratingscience.com\/atomic-resolution\/2021\/04\/19\/cellular-cryo-electron-tomography-education\/"},"modified":"2021-04-19T19:00:36","modified_gmt":"2021-04-19T19:00:36","slug":"cellular-cryo-electron-tomography-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thermofisher.com\/blog\/atomic-resolution\/cellular-cryo-electron-tomography-education\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Access: Cellular Cryo-Electron Tomography Education"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am a research scientist in the Jensen Lab<\/a> at the California Institute of Technology, where Grant is a Principal Investigator. We have worked together for about nine years, focused on structural cell biology and now, more specifically, cellular cryo-electron tomography.<\/p>\n

Grant\u2019s favorite way to introduce what we do is with a quote by the late, great Caltech physicist Richard Feynman:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is very easy to answer many of these fundamental biological questions; you just look at the thing!<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

Faced with questions about how cells work, we think the best way to look is with a cryo-electron microscope. And since everything is better in 3D, we use cellular cryo-electron tomography or cryo-ET<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Understanding Cellular Cryo-Electron Tomography<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Cellular cryo-electron tomography lets us look inside intact cells, without dehydration or staining, simply preserved in their native state in amorphous (\u201cvitreous\u201d) ice. The resolving power is high enough to let us see the shapes and arrangements of macromolecular complexes. Rather than looking at a single protein or complex, we get to see all of the cell\u2019s machinery, frozen at a moment in time.\u00a0 It is a tremendously powerful technique, and, as Feynman foretold, it gives us answers to many fundamental questions about cell biology\u2014even about the structures of the smallest unicellular organisms, bacteria and archaea.<\/p>\n

\"Bdellovibrio

Bacteria assemble specialized type IV secretion systems (T4SSs) to inject molecular cargo into target cells. Using cryo-ET, Chang and Shaffer et al. report<\/a> the first structure of a cancer-associated T4SS in vivo<\/em> and describe unique membranous appendages produced when H. pylori encounters gastric epithelial cells. (Image \u00a9 2016 Oikonomou, C., Chang, YW. & Jensen, G. Nat Rev Microbiol 14, 205\u2013220)<\/p><\/div>\n

While our understanding of structural microbiology has been rocketing along, powered by this new technology, education has been evolving at a much slower pace. By necessity, encyclopedic textbooks of cell biology and microbiology are updated incrementally through painstaking new editions. As a result, students learn about discoveries that were made decades ago, but they don\u2019t get to see the leaps in knowledge we\u2019ve made in this decade. They can\u2019t just look for themselves like they can with a light microscope in a lab course because cryo-EMs are multi-million-dollar instruments that can only be operated by highly trained specialists.<\/p>\n

Since Grant started his lab at Caltech in 2002, scientists in our group have recorded more than 40,000 tomograms of cells. Chasing answers to various biological questions, we\u2019ve put dozens of different species of bacteria and archaea into the microscope. The scientific results are published in articles, and in 2018, we started exploring how to share all our data openly with the scientific community by building a distributed, blockchain-based public database<\/a>. Still, we think the images have even broader appeal, and bet plenty of non-specialists, from trainees in the medical field to armchair enthusiasts of biology, would love to see what bacteria and archaea really look like.<\/p>\n

Open Access Education<\/strong><\/h2>\n

In December 2020, through the Caltech Library, we launched a digital Atlas of Bacterial & Archaeal Cell Structure<\/a>\u2014a free and open-source textbook that brings cryo-ET to life, and is updated frequently to keep pace with advancements in science.<\/p>\n

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We're excited to announce the Atlas of Bacterial & Archaeal Cell Structure (https:\/\/t.co\/KtZjJKUArq<\/a>), an open-access multimedia textbook that shows what's inside microbial cells like never before, featuring ~150 of our best cryotomograms and animations pic.twitter.com\/pXBTlyMpL5<\/a><\/p>\n

— Jensen Lab (@theJensenLab) December 23, 2020<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n