12th International Workshop on Radiation Damage to Biological Samples

Session

Radiation Damage in Electron Crystallography and Microscopy

EC

4 Jun 2025, 10:00

Auditorium (Paul Scherrer Institut)

Conveners

Radiation Damage in Electron Crystallography and Microscopy

• Thomas Ursby (MaxIV)

Radiation Damage in Electron Crystallography and Microscopy

• Gerhard Hofer (Stockholm University)

10. TEM and STEM Imaging of Radiation-Sensitive Samples

Ray EGERTON (University of Alberta)

04/06/2025, 10:00

Invited

Beam damage to biological specimens is more troublesome in the TEM than in x-ray imaging (where the spatial resolution is more modest) despite the stronger diffraction signal provided by electrons [1]. One solution has been to treat tissue (and other) specimens with heavy-metal stain but the preference is to use unstained samples and phase contrast, while cooling the sample to reduce damage...

15. Extending the reach of single-particle cryoEM

Christopher J. RUSSO (MRC Cambridge)

04/06/2025, 10:30

Invited

Ten years on from the “resolution revolution”, molecular structure determination using electron cryomicroscopy (cryoEM) is poised in 2025 or early 2026 to surpass X-ray crystallography as the most used method for experimentally determining new structures [1]. But the technique has not reached the physical limits set by radiation damage and the signal-to-noise ratio in individual images of...

24. Perspectives and limitations in high-resolution cryo-EM

Holger STARK (MPI Göttingen)

04/06/2025, 11:30

Invited

Single particle cryo-EM has become a powerful technology in structure determination of macromolecular complexes. The technique benefits from the decades of investment in the development of high-end electron microscopy hardware, powerful computational hard- and software and the fact that samples do not need to be crystalized. Over the past decade, the number of structures solved by cryo-EM has...

9. A Physical Theory For Cryo-EM at Liquid-Helium Temperatures

Joshua DICKERSON (UC Berkeley)

04/06/2025, 12:00

Invited

The benefits of reducing the data collection temperature for electron cryomicroscopy (cryo-EM) from liquid-nitrogen temperatures to liquid-helium temperatures have been debated over many years. A physical theory of dose-dependent information loss in cryo-EM was presented for imaging vitrified aqueous biological specimens at liquid-nitrogen temperatures [1], but extending this to liquid-helium...

5. Cryo-EM structure of photosystem II reveals damages caused by commonly used electron doses in imaging

Koji KATO (Okayama University)

04/06/2025, 12:30

Invited

Photosystem II (PSII) plays a critical role in water-splitting and oxygen evolution. X-ray crystallography has elucidated its atomic structure and structures of several intermediate states. However, these structures are in the crystalline state, and the structure of the final state remains unresolved. In this study, we analyzed the structure of PSII in solution at a resolution of 1.95 Å using...

11. Radiation damage in recent MicroED measurements

Johan HATTNE (UCLA)

04/06/2025, 13:00

Invited

Microcrystal electron diffraction (MicroED) involves collecting a sequence of diffraction images from a continuously rotating microcrystal in a transmission electron microscope. Due to the small size of these crystals, the resulting diffraction patterns typically feature weak, low-intensity spots. Recent advances in direct electron-counting detectors have significantly improved signal...