event date: 17 November 2023

The Centre of New Technologies, University of Warsaw invites to a seminar by

Tomasz Góral, Szymon Sutuła

Cryomicroscopy and Electron Diffraction Core Facility, Centre of New Technologies, University of Warsaw, Poland

Title: CRYO-EM IS DRIVING STRUCTURAL STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WARSAW

Date: 17thof November 2023, Friday

Time: 12:00 pm (Central European Time)

Host: Silvio Osella, PhD

The seminar will be in the CeNT aula hall (00.142) on the main floor.

Abstract:

In 2019 one of the very first cryo-EM microscopes in the country – the 200kV Glacios equipped with a Falcon3EC camera and a phase plate solution was installed in the University of Warsaw. In the next few years the Cryomicroscopy and Electron Diffraction Core Facility was established and started providing many local structural biologists and chemists with direct access to this ground breaking and Noble-winning technology. To date, there have been only two cryo-EM Core Facilities operating in Poland which provide services in all cryo-EM modalities. We show the current possibilities of our Core Facility and a range of services which are offered to our users. We follow the open-access policy and welcome users from both national and international academic institutions as well as industry. Our recent developments include benchmarking the Single Particle Analysis reconstruction of apoferritin at the 1.92Å level with local resolution reaching 1.65Å and 2.27Å reconstruction of the AbiK bacterial polymerase. The results are further enhanced with the upgrade of the microscope to the micro-ED functionality allowing for a
structure determination of small molecules based on electron diffraction data. With a simple kinematic approach it is possible to successfully refine crystal structures with no needed restraints even when only microsize crystals are available (Fig. 1, right). On top of that, we have recently finalised a process of building 2M PLN-worth IT infrastructure support for the cryo-EM data storage (up to 2 PB) and now expanding on the data processing capabilities which will be a unique set-up of its kind not only in Poland but also in Central Europe. We also show that being able to offer all cryo-EM modalities in one instrument significantly boosts a research potential and opens up new application possibilities.