News

Featured in Columbia Medicine magazine

Posted by: Joachim Frank  |  June 4, 2018  |  No comment
A Nobel Recognizes a Cool Scientific Method
(Pun Intended)
Joachim Frank Honored with 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
By Alla Katsnelson
Until late last year, an amber-colored structure stood on a window sill in Joachim Frank’s lab, where it glowed, backlit by the late morning sun. You would be forgiven for thinking that this series of oddly shaped plastic contours,...

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Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives, Chapter in press

Posted by: Joachim Frank  |  May 4, 2018  |  No comment
New Insights into Ribosome Structure and Function Amy Jobe, Zheng Liu, Cristina Gutierrez-Vargas, and Joachim Frank In the past 4 years, because of the advent of new cameras, many ribosome structures have been solved by cryoelectron microscopy (cryo-EM) at high, often near-atomic resolution, bringing new mechanistic insights into the processes of translation initiation, peptide elongation, termination,...

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Nucleic Acids Research paper in press

Posted by: Joachim Frank  |  May 1, 2018  |  No comment
Cryo-EM shows stages of initial codon selection on the ribosome by aa-tRNA in ternary complex with GTP and the GTPase-deficient EF-TuH84A Marcus Fislage, Jingji Zhang, Zuben Patrick Brown, Chandra Sekhar Mandava, Suparna Sanya, Mans Ehrenberg and Joachim Frank ABSTRACT The GTPase EF-Tu in ternary complex with GTP and aminoacyl-tRNA (aa-tRNA) promotes rapid and accurate delivery of cognate aa-tRNAs to the ribosomal...

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American Chemical Society Editors’ Choice

Posted by: Joachim Frank  |  April 30, 2018  |  No comment
New Opportunities Created by Single-Particle Cryo-EM: The Mapping of Conformational Space is now published online at http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.biochem.8b00064 and is available open access as part of the ACS Editors' Choice initiative. ACS Editors’ Choice
One...

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Paper accepted to IUCrJ

Posted by: Joachim Frank  |  April 19, 2018  |  No comment
Identification of ions in experimental electrostatic potential maps. Jimin Wang, Zheng Liu, Joachim Frank and Peter Moore. International Union of Crystallography Journal ABSTRACT Cryo-electron microscopy (EM) directly images the distribution of electrostatic potential within macromolecules, and thus can provide much more information about atomic charges than X-ray crystallography normally does. The electron scattering length of an isolated ion is quite different from that of the corresponding neutral atom. The difference is very large at small scattering angles where the effects of electron...

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New Book: Single-Particle Cryo-Electron Microscopy

Posted by: Joachim Frank  |  April 16, 2018  |  No comment
https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/10844 Series in Structural Biology: Volume 10 Single-Particle Cryo-Electron Microscopy The Path Toward Atomic Resolution/ Selected Papers of Joachim...

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Binita Shah featured in Columbia Science Review

Posted by: Joachim Frank  |  April 9, 2018  |  No comment
Frank Lab's undergraduate researcher, Binita Shah, was filmed in Columbia Science Review's
"Scientists in the Making" series.

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Günter Blobel (May 21, 1936 – February 18, 2018)

Posted by: Joachim Frank  |  February 20, 2018  |  No comment
Günter Blobel was a German biologist born in Silesia, which is now part of Poland. He received the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for the discovery that proteins have intrinsic signals – Zip code-like -- that govern their transport and localization in the cell. Following his pioneering biochemical discoveries on signaling he postulated the existence of a “translocon,” a pore in the ER membrane specialized to receive polypeptides...

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Donald Parsons

Posted by: Joachim Frank  |  December 31, 2017  |  No comment
Donald Parsons passed away earlier this month at age 89. He established high-voltage electron microscopy at the Division of Labs and Research of the New York State Department of Health in Albany, later to be renamed Wadsworth Center. Parsons was convinced that most cancers were caused by viruses, and that the reason they had not been found was a sampling problem. Imaging whole cells in 3D with 1MV electrons would be a way to find them. Parsons...

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Ross Smith

Posted by: Joachim Frank  |  December 19, 2017  |  Comment
On Saturday, Dec 16, our dear friend and colleague Ross Smith died of cancer.  Below is the message circulated on the 3DEM list, signed by Ueli Aebi, Andreas Engel, Martin Kessel and Alasdair Steven, who all know him from the time in Eduard Kellenberger’s lab at the Biozentrum in Basel. Ross was one of the early pioneers in the development of image processing software dedicated to the reconstruction of symmetric assemblies.  I first...

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