The secret lives of cells — as never seen before

Diana Kwon:

With cryo-EM, scientists make a 3D image by taking 2D pictures of lots of isolated molecules in different configurations, and merging the results. With cryo-ET, by contrast, they take multiple snapshots of a single chunk of material, teeming with molecules, from many different angles, allowing the surroundings to be kept intact.

It’s like having a photo of a whole crowd, rather than one person’s headshot. This is why Wolfgang Baumeister, a biophysicist at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany, who is one of the pioneers of the technique, and his colleagues have dubbed it “molecular sociology”.

And this is how proteins live, after all. “Proteins are social — at any given time a protein is in a complex with about ten other proteins,” says Villa. After viewing such interactions with cryo-ET, “I could not stomach the thought of myself studying another protein in isolation,” she adds.