Establishment of Cryo-EM screening facility at University of Dundee

Cryo-electron microscopy (Cryo-EM) has become a powerful method to determine three-dimensional (3D) structures of macromolecular complexes.

The technological developments to electron microscopes, detectors and processing software have enabled researchers to achieve high-resolution structures.

Hence Cryo-EM has revolutionized structural biology to provide unprecedented insights into protein structure and function.

Substantial investment has established national centres for data collection at the eBIC facility in Harwell and at the SCMI facility in Glasgow.

To ensure that only the highest quality samples are selected for ultimate resolution data collection at the national facilities, it is equally important that the institutes that feed into them have excellent instrumentation for sample screening.

To meet growing demand for Cryo-EM in Dundee this proposal requests support for the purchase of a Glacios Cryo-TEM with 200 kV X-FEG optics with an Autoloader for cryogenic sample manipulation and Falcon 3EC detector (or similar).

In addition to efficient sample screening, this system supports high resolution data acquisition for single particle analysis, sample quality assessment, tomography, and other applications.

This microscope will provide high quality screening for optimizing cryo-EM samples prior to data collection at National facilities, but also can determine structures at sub-3 Å resolution in house.