News

Hirschegg – old memories from the 1960s.

Posted by: Joachim Frank  |  October 11, 2019  |  No comment

I was recently invited by Michael Roehrl to present a talk at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Institute, here on the East Side of Manhattan. Michael, a physician and researcher at this Institute, is the son of a student I knew from my time in the late 60s at Walter Hoppe’s group, which combined X-ray crystallography with electron microscopy.

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New paper in Nature

Posted by: Joachim Frank  |  May 19, 2019  |  No comment
Our paper ‘Late steps in bacterial translation initiation visualized using time-resolved cryo-EM' by Kaledhonkar et al. has been scheduled for Accelerated Article Preview (AAP) on http://www.nature.com/nature on 20 May 2019 at 1600 London time / 1100 US Eastern Time. ABSTRACT. Bacterial translation initiation entails the tightly regulated joining of the 50S ribosomal subunit to an initiator transfer RNA (fMet-tRNAfMet)-containing 30S ribosomal initiation complex (IC) to form a 70S IC that subsequently matures into a 70S elongation-competent complex (70S EC). Rapid and accurate 70S IC formation...

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Sydney Brenner 1927 – 2019

Posted by: Joachim Frank  |  April 6, 2019  |  No comment

Sydney Brenner died on April 5 in Singapore at the age of 92. 

Brenner has been called a giant of molecular biology.  Among his many contributions to this field are key experiments in 1961 proving that the mRNA is the carrier of genetic information, and the substrate for protein synthesis on the ribosome.   Here I want to focus...

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Miloslav (“Milas”) Boublik 1927 – 1994

Posted by: Joachim Frank  |  January 16, 2019  |  No comment

In my recent talk at the Ribosome meeting in Merida, Mexico, which traced the role of the ribosome in driving and facilitating the development of single-particle EM, I paid tribute to Milas Boublik.  At the time I met him, in 1980, he was a research...

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Aaron Klug 1926 – 2018

Posted by: Joachim Frank  |  November 30, 2018  |  No comment
Obituary in the Telegraph: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2018/11/22/aaron-klug-om-physicist-won-nobel-prize-work-electron-microscopy/ Obituary in the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/aaron-klug-nobel-winning-scientist-who-examined-molecular-structure-dies-at-92/2018/11/24/b8a99d4a-ef95-11e8-baac-2a674e91502b_story.html?utm_term=.6bcc7558883a These...

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New paper in PNAS

Posted by: Joachim Frank  |  November 6, 2018  |  No comment
Structure and activity of lipid bilayer within a membrane-protein transporter. Weihua Qiu, Ziao Fu, Guoyan...

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Tom Steitz 1940 – 2018

Posted by: Joachim Frank  |  October 15, 2018  |  No comment
    Tom Steitz was an over-towering figure in X-ray crystallography. In 2000, together with Peter Moore he solved and interpreted the structure of the 50S subunit of the ribosome of Haloarcula marismortuis, a salt-loving archaebacterium living in the Dead Sea. For his part in the elucidation of ribosome structure he received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly with Ada Yonath and Venki Ramakrishnan, who both focused on the small...

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Paper accepted in Protein Science

Posted by: Melissa Thomas Baum  |  October 1, 2018  |  No comment
On the damage done to the structure of the T. acidophilum proteasome by electron radiation. Jimin Wang, Zheng Liu, Robert H. Crabtree, Joachim Frank, and Peter B. Moore SUMMARY It has long been known that proteins are damaged when they are exposed to the electron beam in an electron microscope. Here we show that exposure to electrons under cryo‐EM conditions leads to a small change in the quaternary structure of the T. acidophilum proteasome, and that backbones atoms belonging to the α‐helices...

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Artifacts in the Nobel Museum, Stockholm

Posted by: Joachim Frank  |  September 20, 2018  |  No comment
Featured in the guided tours. On the left is the back-illuminated box containing a stack of transparent sheets with contours that I donated to the Museum. The contours depict the first molecule that was reconstructed in 3D using the single-particle technique. The year is 1986. In particular, the random-conical tilt method was used to obtain the angle assignments. On the right is the apparatus used by Jacques Dubochet in 1981 to plunge an EM grid into liquid ethane, immersed in a bath of liquid nitrogen. (Richard Henderson’s display – the atomic model of bacteriorhodopsin obtained by cryo-EM,...

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Paper accepted in Proteomics

Posted by: Melissa Thomas Baum  |  September 20, 2018  |  No comment
Identification of changing ribosome protein compositions using mass spectrometry
Parimal Samir, Christopher M. Brown, Rahul Rahul, Ming Sun, Bingxin Shen, Wen Li, Joachim Frank, and Andrew J. Link

ABSTRACT: The regulatory role of the ribosome in gene expression has come into sharper focus. It has been proposed that ribosomes are dynamic complexes capable of changing their protein composition in response...

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