Hyderabad: Cryo-electron microscopy facility opens at CCMB

Hyderabad: A cutting edge facility for cryo-electron microscopy was inaugurated by Director-General, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Dr Shekhar Mande, at Hyderabad-based Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) on Friday. The CSIR-funded cryo-electron microscopy will allow scientists to look at matter to its atomic details, CCMB researchers in a release said. A […]

Hyderabad: A cutting edge facility for cryo-electron microscopy was inaugurated by Director-General, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Dr Shekhar Mande, at Hyderabad-based Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) on Friday.

The CSIR-funded cryo-electron microscopy will allow scientists to look at matter to its atomic details, CCMB researchers in a release said. A close look at molecules such as proteins has been at the forefront of understanding the structural details of living cells and drive drug discovery. In the last two years, such insights have enabled the scientists and pharmaceutical industries to understand the coronavirus and find out potential cures, CCMB said.

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“The facility is expected to help us view the functioning of several molecular machines that operate in the cell that were earlier not amenable to conventional structure determination methods such as X-ray crystallography or Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR),” said Dr Rajan Sankaranarayanan, an eminent structural biologist at CCMB.

Dr Vinay K Nandicoori, Director, CCMB said that the new facility will be accessible to researchers in CCMB, other CSIR labs, research institutes, universities, biotech and pharmaceutical industries. The facility has been largely built in CCMB in the last two years during Covid pandemic”.
This facility will allow working with samples at cryogenic temperatures, around -173 degree Celsius and photographing individual molecules using the electron microscope.

“Structural biology techniques have advanced greatly in the last four decades. From needing a year to collect and making sense of each data point to doing it in a few seconds now, the power is enormous. The chasm between structural and cellular biology is diminishing, and this will allow addressing some of the very fundamental and exciting problems of biology with techniques like cryo-electron microscopy,” said Dr Shekhar Mande, DG, CSIR.

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