Freeze sample preparation at low cooling rate to eliminate rapid protein drift

On September 6, 2021, " QRB Discovery " magazine published online the research paper "Low-cooling-rate freezing in biomolecular cryo-electron microscopy for recovery of initial frames" by the Zhang Xinzheng group of the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences

In the 1980s, Dubochet quickly poured water-containing samples into liquid ethane at -183°C to prepare low-temperature samples embedded in glassy ice to reduce the damage caused by high-energy electron beams to biological samples

After nearly 5 years of research, we found that the rapid drift originates from the stress generated by glassy ice when it freezes rapidly.

Researcher Zhang Xinzheng of the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences is the corresponding author of this article, and doctoral students Wu Chunling and Shi Huigang of the Zhang Xinzheng research group are the co-first authors of the article

Figure 1.

Article link:

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(Contribution: Zhang Xinzheng Research Group)