High resolution single particle analysis of biological macromolecules

细胞生物学的巨大挑战之一是提高原子分辨率结构测定的速度，特别是膜蛋白和大分子组装。目前的限速步骤是高质量的晶体生产。我们的目标是证明蛋白质结构可以通过单粒子分析确定到原子分辨率。三维结构将通过计算排列单个随机定向分子的高分辨率电子显微镜图像来产生。这个项目的重要性在于，已经有超过12万个蛋白质序列被建立了数据库，随着新的基因组测序项目的完成，这个数字将迅速增加。

One of the great challenges of cell biology is to increase the rate of atomic resolution structure determination, particularly of membrane proteins and macromolecular assemblies. The current rate-limiting step is high quality crystal production. Our goal is to prove that protein structures can be determined to atomic resolution by single-particle analysis. 3D structures will be produced by computationally aligning high-resolution electron microscope images of individual, randomly oriented molecules. The importance of this project is highlighted by the fact over 120,000 protein sequences are already databased, a number set to increase rapidly as new genome sequencing projects are completed.