Protein Assemblies Made by Evolution and by Design...and Understood through Cryo-EM

Proteins represent the most versatile building blocks available to living organisms or the laboratory scientist for constructing multi-component machines and functional materials. Our lab has been interested both in understanding the functioning of such macromolecular protein machines generated through natural evolution and in designing from scratch new ones with emergent physical and functional properties. Given the large sizes of such protein assemblies (10 nm to several m) and their inherent dynamics, their structural characterization by cryo-EM has been necessary. In this presentation, I will give a few examples of our recent work, highlighting the central importance of cryo-EM in these studies.