Rethinking molecular engineering in structural biology
Dr. Nicolas Garreau de Loubresse - Wyss Institute, Harvard University
The classical structural biology techniques—X-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance—have given us a chemistry-level understanding of biological processes and enabled rational drug design. Over the last three years, advances in both software and hardware have revolutionized structure determination by cryo-electron microscopy, with the resolutions obtained beginning to rival those from X-ray crystallography. Together, these techniques have transformed the way we understand biological mechanisms but a large fraction of macromolecules still remains out of reach because of technical limitations. I will discuss the current and future development of molecular engineering applied to structural biology and present our progress in developing new tools to expand the capabilities of structural biology techniques using DNA nanotechnology.