UK biochemist honoured as molecular imaging takes Nobel Prize for Chemistry

The 2017 Nobel Prize for Chemistry has been awarded to Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson for the development of cryo-electron microscopy. Dubochet, who is now retired, is Swiss; Frank, of Columbia University, New York, is German, and Henderson, of the MRC laboratory of molecular biology in Cambridge, is Scottish.

Cryo-electron microscopy was first developed in the 1980s as a means of imaging biological specimens without their delicate tissues being damaged by the process of electron microscopy, which had previously been limited to non-living subjects.

It depends on being able to cool a sample of a biological substance in water so fast that it becomes glass like, preserving its natural state without damage and allowing it to be imaged by an electron microscope with no need for fixing or staining, because electron microscopy takes place under vacuum, non-vitrified water evaporates during the process.

The cooling technique was first demonstrated by Dubochet, while Frank developed image processing techniques that allowed complex protein molecules to be viewed in 3D; Henderson moved the technique on by imaging a bacteria molecule at atomic resolution.