BIOCHEMISTRY

The Joshua Coon Lab and Timothy Grant Lab united the power of two major tools in biotechnology. In research published April 27 in Nature Communications, the labs describe a game-changing advance that marries mass spectrometry and electron microscopy (EM).

“This work is the culmination of a nearly five-year effort to couple mass spec technology to EM,” says Coon, a professor of biomolecular chemistry and the Thomas & Margaret Pyle Chair at the Morgridge Institute for Research.

Coon's Lab capitalized on the collaborative environment at the Morgridge Institute to seek the expertise and advice of Tim Grant, an assistant professor of biochemistry and Morgridge investigator in virology who specializes in electron microscopy and is an author on the paper.

“I was immediately excited by the potential of this technology to revolutionize the way cryo-EM samples are made and to solve a number of the limitations cryo-EM currently has,” Grant says. “This paper represents an excellent step towards the creation of cryo-EM samples that will lead to better resolutions and the ability to solve structures which cannot be solved with the current techniques.”

Read about this exciting work on the Morgridge Institute for Research website.