NEWS
Dec 15, 2012
 Host an Electron Tomography Workshop with Peter Ercius at NCEM from Jan. 16-18th, 2013.

Nov 20, 2012
 Four postdoc positions are open in implementation of individual-particle electron tomography.

April 30, 2012
 Gang Ren received Irvine Page Investigator Research Finalist Award from ATVB 2012.

April 9, 2012
The CETP research is under spotlight of Department of Energy.

February 21, 2012
IPET method is under the spotlight. The News has been released on the front page of LBNL website.

February 19, 2012
CETP tunnel mechanism paper has been pre-printed by Nature Chemical Biology.

January 24, 2012
IPET method is under the spotlight. The News has been released on the front page of LBNL website.

January 24, 2012
IPET reconstruction method for determining the structure an individual protein is published by PLoS One , [pdf download]

Developing individual particle electron tomography (IPET) for studying protein dynamics via the structure determination of a single protein

ren1
The research objective of this laboratory is to develop a technique for directly determining the high-resolution structure (better than 1nm) of an individual protein at an intermediate resolution (1-2nm). The motivation of this development is that. The dynamic personalities and structural heterogeneity of proteins are essential for their proper functions. However, structural determination of dynamic and heterogeneous proteins is very challenging by conventional approaches, such as X-ray, NMR and electron microscopy (EM) single-particle electron microscopy because all these current techniques require an average from thousands to millions different proteins. This lab reported a high-resolution structure determination method, named individual particle electron tomography (IPET) to determine an individual protein at near an intermediate resolution, such as 1.4nm IgG antibody (PLoS ONE, 2012, 7(1):30249). We will continually develop this approach by optimization from both experiments and computer programs to achieve high-resolution structure of a single protein for addressing the most importance questions in the fields of biology and soft-materials.