June 2019
Beginner to intermediate
576 pages
25h 29m
English
Szymon W. Manka and Carolyn A. Moores
Institute of Structural and Molecular Biology, Birkbeck College, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HX, UK
The electron microscope (EM) has been a key tool for biologists since its invention by Ernst Ruska in the 1930s (Table 18.1). Use of EM to visualise cell samples led to the discovery of many key aspects of cell ultrastructure and function, while EM imaging of molecular samples was first used for 3D structure determination of macromolecular complexes in the late 1960s [1].
Table 18.1 Nobel Prizes awarded in EM (www.nobelprize.org).
| Name | Year | Nobel citation |
| Joseph John Thompson | Physics, 1906 | ‘In recognition of the great merits of his theoretical and experimental investigations on the conduction of electricity by gases’ |
| Aaron Klug | Chemistry, 1982 | ‘For his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid–protein complexes’ |
| Ernst Ruska | Physics, 1986 | ‘For his fundamental work in electron optics, and for the design of the first electron microscope’ |
| Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank, Richard Henderson | Chemistry, 2017 | ‘For developing cryo‐electron microscopy for the high‐resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution’ |
EM of biological samples brings challenges. The first is the fundamentally destructive nature of the electron radiation used in the ...