MRC Scientist Wins 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

摘要

Our congratulations go to Richard Henderson ot the MRC's Laboratory ot Molecular Biology(LMB)who has been awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry,alongside Professor Jacques Dubochet and Dr Joachim Frank(LMB alumnus)"for developing cryo-electron microscopy(cryo-EM)for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution.”This is the eleventh Nobel Prize awarded for work undertaken at the LMB,which has earned the nickname of’the Nobel Prize factory'.Since its establishment over 100 years ago,the total number of Nobel prizes awarded to MRC-funded scientists is now 23.Richard will receive his Nobel Prize in Sweden in December,the MRC were delighted to announce.Born and educated in Scotland,Richard received a PhD at Cambridge then worked at Yale University before returning to the LMB where,since 1973,his work has helped to advance the use of electron microscopy to solve complex membrane protein structures.Together with Nigel Unwin he successfully determined the first structure of 2-D crystals of the membrane protein bacteriorhodopsin using electron microscopy in 1975.This insight and Richard's drive and determination over the next two decades led to the development of better detectors for electron microscopes and better software to analyse the images.This revolutionised the technique of cryo-EM,which involves flash-cooling molecules in a thin layer of aqueous solution before imaging them,a crucial method invented by Jacques Dubochet and his colleagues in the early 1980s.Computational processing the images is a key step,to which Joachim Frank made major early contributions.