Technology Advance and Application of Cryo-Electron Microscopy in Molecular Biology and Biomedicine
A special issue of International Journal of Molecular Sciences (ISSN 1422-0067). This special issue belongs to the section "Molecular Biophysics".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 20 February 2025 | Viewed by 8447
Special Issue Editors
Interests: biophysics; chemical biology; molecular biology; cryo-electron microscopy
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The resolution revolution and widespread applications of cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) in the past decade have virtually changed all aspects of molecular biology and biomedical research. The present field of cryo-EM approaches and applications is a highly vibrant, multidisciplinary global community that draws talented researchers from all traditional disciplines, including those from mathematics, physics, chemistry and computer sciences, who have collectively changed the landscape of how cryo-EM can be used to address significant, hitherto intractable, problems and challenges in molecular biology, biochemistry and biomedicine. Many structures of large, dynamic complex machineries of essential cellular functions in thermodynamically stable states which are refractory to other structural determination technologies have been determined at high resolution by cryo-EM. It has now also become possible to visualize functional kinetics and non-equilibrium conformational dynamics at near-atomic resolution with the state-of-the-art methodology enabled by time-resolved cryo-EM. These advances open tremendous opportunities at the forefront of research in molecular biology and biomedicine.
This Special Issue will focus on all aspects of technological advancement and the application of cryo-EM, including in situ cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET), in molecular biology and biomedicine. We particularly welcome high-quality original studies with respect to experimental methods for cryo-EM/ET sample preparation and imaging, including cryoFIB-SEM, cryo-CLEM, and related methodologies. We also welcome computational and machine-learning tools, including simulations, for analyzing heterogeneous cryo-EM/ET data, cryo-EM/ET analysis of structural dynamics of important molecular machines using novel strategies and approaches, and particularly the application and development of cryo-EM/ET to structure-based drug discovery and pharmacological applications, as well as the integration or hybridization of cryo-EM/ET with complementary approaches.
Both high-quality original research articles and cutting-edge focused reviews summarizing important advances in the field are welcome for submission. Authors are encouraged to take advantage of the great flexibility of the article format with unlimited length, and to use this Special Issue as a permanent digital forum to document their unique scholarly opinions and novel concepts, while enjoying the great visibility of this open-access online journal that is indexed in major citation databases such as SCIE, PubMed, Scopus and Crossref. All submissions will undergo rigorous and timely peer review prior to acceptance. Poor quality or out-of-scope submission will be rejected without sending out for peer review. This Special Issue aims to publish up to 10 peer-reviewed full-length articles, but exceptions will be considered for high-quality original articles.
Prof. Dr. Youdong Mao
Dr. Jesús Gerardo Galaz-Montoya
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM)
- cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET)
- cryo-EM sample preparation
- single-particle analysis
- sub-tomogram averaging
- structural determination
- molecular machines
- structural dynamics
- structure-based drug discovery
- machine learning
- conformational states
- conformational landscape
- conformational continuum
- time-resolved cryo-EM
- atomic modeling
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