Enhancing Investigation into the Structure
of Biological and Soft Materials
The research objective of this laboratory is to develop a technique for directly determining the structure 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 proper functioning. However, structural determination of dynamic and heterogeneous proteins is very challenging by conventional approaches of X-ray and electron microscopy (EM) of single-particle electron microscopy that require an average from thousands to millions different proteins. This lab reported a high-resolution structure determination method, 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).
