Got It Down Cold: Cryo-Electron Microscopy Named Method of the Year

In his blog late last week, NIH Director Francis S. Collins highlighted Cryo-EM Microscopy, the Method of the Year 2015. Collins gave a retrospective analysis of how far the method has come over the past decade, and credits most of the advances to improvements in the technology available, particularly computational methods for image construction and direct electron detectors that can fix the blurring problem caused by molecules moving around in the electron beam. With these and other changes, the number of structures determined using this method have increased substantially in just the past year. Molecular Biophysics & Integrated Bioimaging’s Robert Glaeser got a shout-out for his Nature Methods commentary, which says that owing to the laws of physics, we can expect more good things.