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MicroED: From Powder to Structure in a Half-Hour
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Credit: Adapted from Jones et al. ChemRxiv.org
Over the past few years, there’s been a great deal of excitement about the power of cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) for mapping the structures of large biological molecules like proteins and nucleic acids. Now comes word of another absolutely incredible use of cryo-EM: determining with great ease and exquisite precision the structure of the smaller organic chemical compounds, or “small molecules,” that play such key roles in biological exploration and drug development.
The new advance involves a cryo-EM technique called microcrystal-electron diffraction (MicroED). As detailed in a preprint on ChemRxiv.org [1] and the journal Angewandte Chemie [2], MicroED has enabled researchers to take the powdered form of commercially available small molecules and generate high-resolution data on their chemical structures in less than a half-hour—dramatically faster than with traditional methods!
