Cryo-EM Core News

Over sixty UNC neurobiology students visited the cryoEM core for a hands-on session organized by Dr. Alexandra Nowlan to explore advanced structural and cellular biology. Dr. Joshua Strauss hosted the visit, where students toured the facility’s workflows and attended a lecture on the revolutionary impact of cryoEM. The experience was...

The Cryo-EM Core’s research technician Emily Robinson was recently accepted to and attended the “I Have My Dataset – Now What?” cryo-EM data processing workshop hosted by the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Workshop participants were led through hands-on tutorials in data and image processing softwares RELION, CryoDRGN, CryoSPARC,...

CHAPEL HILL, NC – In the continuing effort to improve upon opioid pain relievers, American and Chinese scientists used cryoEM technology to solve the detailed structures of the entire family of opioid receptors bound to their naturally occurring peptides. Subsequent structure-guided biochemical studies were then performed to better understand the...

The UNC School of Medicine lab of Bryan L. Roth, MD, PhD, solved the high-resolution, complex structures of drug-like compounds bound to designer brain cell receptors, paving the way for the creation of next-generation chemogenetic tools. Postdoc Shicheng Zhang, PhD, led this research published in Nature. Read More

Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center have uncovered a new checkpoint that cells use to control what molecules they internalize. Understanding the determinants for entry into cells could lead to the design of better therapeutics that must enter through...

Dr. Jonathan Fay, in collaboration with Jared Peck and Dr. Joshua Strauss of the UNC CH CryoEM Core, published a method paper in IUCrJ (International Union of Crystallography Journal) outlining their success in optimizing the function of a microscope for cryogenic electron microscopy (CryoEM). CryoEM is an imaging technique that yields 3D...

Ever wonder what’s going on when you get itchy skin, whether from a rash or medication or some other bodily reaction? And why do some strong anti-itching medications make us nauseous, dry-mouthed zombies? Scientists at the UNC School of Medicine and the University of California at San Francisco conducted research...

Biochemistry and biophysics PhD student, Cathy Spangler, researches in Robert McGinty’s lab and recently published a paper in collaboration with Joshua Boyer, Joshua Strauss, Andrew Cesmat, Pengda Liu, Robert McGinty, and Qi Zhang, titled Structural basis of nucleosome-dependent cGAS inhibition. This article addresses the use of cryo-electron microscopy to determine the high-resolution structure of...

For two days (December 16-17, 2019) Structural Biologists, from across the Piedmont, attended the first ever 2019 Triangle Area Cryo-EM Symposium in Durham, NC. The event, funded in part by an Interdisciplinary Colloquium Grant from the Duke School of Medicine, allowed researchers from Duke University, North Carolina University at Chapel...

The School of Medicine is hosting an open house for the UNC CryoEM core facility on Friday, November 8th from 3pm-5pm in Glaxo Room 008.