Scientists Unveil Structure of Adenovirus 20
An anonymous reader contributes this snippet from Medical News Daily, which begins a story of some interesting medical detective work: "After more than a decade of research, Scripps Research Institute scientists have pieced together the structure of a human adenovirus—the largest complex ever determined at atomic resolution. The new findings about the virus, which causes respiratory, eye, and gastrointestinal infections, may lead to more effective gene therapy and to new anti-viral drugs."
Re:TFA Omits a Second Study (Score:4, Interesting)
While this technique avoids the inherent difficulties of producing crystals (a process that can take decades for some samples), until very recently it has been difficult to achieve high resolution structures using this method. The cryo-EM adenovirus structure is one of only a handful of atomic resolution cryo-EM structures that have been solved to date.
A large part of the reason why this is possible is the high internal symmetry of viral particles; I think all of the atomic-resolution cryo-EM structures so far have also been of highly symmetric structures like bacterial chaperonins, or other viruses. (The same symmetry also makes crystallography easier, for different reasons.) The only other EM structure that I'm aware of at better than 4 Angstrom resolution is also of a virus, published a few months ago by the same group at UCLA. For highly asymmetric structures such as ribosomes, crystallography is still far ahead of EM as far as resolution is concerned - although the bottleneck of crystallization remains a major problem.
it is interesting that the Medical Daily focuses only on the x-ray crystallography study from Scripps. . . Perhaps Medical Daily needs to do a better job of doing their homework.
If you scroll to the end of the story, you'll see "Provided by Scripps Research Institute" in tiny gray letters. It's just a press release from Scripps, in other words - standard operating procedure for research institutions when someone scores a high-profile article.