Cryo-EM Archives

Seeing the polymerase molecule that transcribes photosynthetic genes in the plant chloroplast. Images of individual molecules collected with an electron microscope were sorted and aligned to reveal details of the structural architecture of the protein complex. CREDIT Michael Webster & Ishika Pramanick

Biochemistry & Organic Chemistry, Biophysics, Biosignatures & Paleobiology, Microbiology & Virology, Origin & Evolution of Life, Plant Biology, Press Release

Photosynthetic Secrets Come To Light

by Keith CowingMarch 5, 2024March 5, 2024

Secrets of photosynthesis have been discovered at atomic level, shedding important new light on this plant super-power that greened the earth more than a billion years ago.

Fitness landscape of the TPR. Average fitness values for a given nucleotide position in TPR secondary structure (A) and tertiary structure (B) (Movie S2). Mean fitness of point mutations is shown by color scale from red to blue. Names of stems and junctions of t1 and 5TU are colored in cyan and orange, respectively. For full map fitness of individual mutations at all positions, see SI Appendix, Fig. S19. - Aarhus University

Biochemistry & Organic Chemistry, Biophysics, Cryobiology, Genomics, Proteomics, Bioinformatics, Nanotechnology & SynBio, Origin & Evolution of Life, Press Release

Cryo-microscopy Reveals Nano-sized Copy Machine Implicated In The Origin Of Life

by Keith CowingJanuary 24, 2024January 23, 2024

How the intricate molecular machinery of life arose from simple beginnings has been a long-standing question. Several lines of evidence point towards a primordial “RNA world”, where an “RNA copy […]