Bereiche | Tage | Auswahl | Suche | Downloads | Hilfe

SYDI: Symposium Diffractive Imaging

SYDI 1: Imaging of biological systems

SYDI 1.2: Hauptvortrag

Freitag, 12. März 2010, 11:00–11:30, E 415

The hitchhikers guide to cryo-electron tomography - A voyage to the inner space of cells — •Juergen Plitzko — Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, Department of Molecular Structural Biology, Martinsried, Germany

'One Picture is Worth Ten Thousand Words'; this slogan from former times depicts clearly the fact that human beings are, by and large, visually centred. A long hold dream, for example, of biologists is the ability to 'zoom' in on very fine details of living matter, literally in one go, from the complete organism to one single cell and beyond. However, today, we have to utilize different microscopes operating at different resolution levels to make this dream halfway come true. Therefore researchers use different probing signals to cover the different length scales and to visualize the gamut of organic and cellular functions. The cornucopia of available imaging methods and techniques is enormous, and we have already travelled a long way to reach our ultimate goal - the voyage to the inner space of cells. At the level of a single cell we might think that we already know a great deal, but at the supramolecular level the cell is still an uncharted territory. With this presentation we are trying to explain in detail the method of cryo-electron tomography and to teach the audience in the major concepts of tomographic imaging for structural biology. Moreover, we want to provide an outlook into future developments especially regarding hybrid approaches, where several methods are combined to work in unison for the one goal, which we have already stated - a voyage to the inner space of a cell.