News

Congratulations to Jingji Zhang on receiving his PhD. The ceremony was held at Uppsala church and the banquet was in the Uppsala castle.
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I ran into Earl Kirkland at a recent Material Science symposium at Cornell University where I was invited as the keynote speaker.  He mentioned a photo (which he now sent) going back to the time I spent in Benjamin Siegel’s lab at Clark Hall, Cornell University, in 1972.  Even though we didn’t overlap, I met him later after I moved to Albany, in 1975.  He adopted and expanded a technique I developed for reconstructing both amplitude and phase of an object from a defocus series (published in  Frank, Biophys. J. 1972). The photo is remarkable not so much for the long hair  -- which was ubiquitous...

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Congratulations to Israel Fernandez for the publication of his new article in eLife, together with Venki Ramakrishnan: ”Structural characterization of ribosome recruitment and translocation by type IV IRES” Click here to read.

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The article “Continuous Changes in Structure Mapped by Manifold Embedding of Single-Particle Data in Cryo-EM” authored by Joachim Frank and Abbas Ourmazd has been accepted by the journal Methods. ABSTRACT: Cryo-electron microscopy, when combined with single-particle reconstruction, is a powerful method for studying macromolecular structure. Recent developments in detector technology have pushed the resolution into a range comparable to that of X-ray crystallography. However, cryo-EM is able...

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Knud Nierhaus passed away a few days ago. He is remembered as one of the most prolific ribosome specialists and connoisseurs well before the structure of the ribosome was solved. Numerous concepts and ingenious experiments are attached to his name, including the alpha-epsilon model which postulated an allosteric mechanism coupling A-site tRNA accommodation with E-site tRNA release, and the complete reconstitution of the 50S subunit from its constituents...

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Walter Hoppe (March 21, 1917 – November 3, 1986) Archives of the Max Planck Society, Berlin

Geng (Gary) Ren approached me recently asking for a picture of Walter Hoppe, my Ph.D. mentor at the Max Planck Institute in Munich 1968-1970. The reason was that I had a few conversations with Gary some years ago about the early development of electron tomography, which Hoppe even applied to the imaging...

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Ewen Callaway’s News Feature in Nature on September 9, 2015 “The revolution will not be crystallized: a new method sweeps through structural biology” is astounding in its ignorance and disregard of historical facts. It disqualifies him as a serious science journalist. David DeRosier attempted to set the record straight in a Letter to the Editor, but his submission was dismissed by Nature, and relegated to the comments section of the journalistic masterpiece. Here is David’s letter in full:

2015-11-29 10:55 PM Callaway’s news feature in Nature (1) identifies the current...

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Hi all, Attached is a reference picture on how the wet lab bench can look like after you worked on it. Use this knowledge wisely! Cheers Marcus

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Another article by Frank Lab has been published in Microscopy journal. Generalized single-particle cryo-EM – a historical perspective. By Joachim Frank. ABSTRACT: This is a brief account of the earlier history of single-particle cryo-EM of biological molecules lacking internal symmetry, which goes back to the mid-seventies. The emphasis of this review is on the mathematical concepts and computational approaches. It is written as the field experiences...

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Frank Lab's recent paper in Nucleic Acids Research journal has been featured on Columbia's Biological Sciences website. Dynamical features of the Plasmodium falciparum ribosome during translation. Sun, M., Li, W., Blomqvist, K., Das, S., Hashem, Y., Dvorin, J.D. and Frank, J. You can see it highlighted here: http://biology.ias-drupal7-test.cc.columbia.edu/ and here:
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