Bay Area cryoEM meeting 2020

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Back in February, I attended the The 2020 Bay Area cryoEM meeting. The meeting covered everything from cryoEM sample prep to analysis and modeling. The conference also featured some of the new exciting structures solved by the bay area labs. The meeting took place back when we could have in person gatherings, and was hosted by Gatan in Dublin. I got to see old friends and it was really nice to match a face to the names I know from scientific papers. I even caught a ride with new friends, there and back! Here are a few highlights from the meeting I put together for you.

Highlights:

  • Sample prep and cryoEM tools:
    • Avinash Patel (Nogales lab) explained Graphene Oxide grids and collecting tilted data.
    • Feng Wang (Cheng and Agard labs) explained about Graphene Oxide based EM grids.
    • Leeya Engel (Dunn lab) explained micropatterning of ECM proteins on EM grids for designed cell placements. Read more
    • Max Armstrong (Fletcher and Glaese labs) showed what is happening during blotting.
  • Strucutre validation and modeling:
    • Oleg Sobolev explained about structure validation and modeling, and what is ramaZ.
    • Pavel Afonine expanded more about Phenix for cryoEM maps, modeling, and validation. Composite maps and sharpening.
    • Greg Pintilie (Chiu lab) introduced about Qscore, which quantified atomic resolution. Read more
  • New structures:
    • Jianhua Zhou (Cheng lab) presented the Wasabi Receptor and its activation. Read more
    • Hanzhi Zhang (Zhou lab at Amgen) talked about potassium ion channels required for bacterial growth. TrkA, TrkH, and ATP.
    • Stefan Oliver (Arvin lab) described viral glycoproteins of Herpes Virus. Virology.
    • Maria Maldonado (Letts lab) presented the plant respiratory complexes and mETC. Plant biology.
    • Simon Fromm (Hurley lab) talked about Rag GTPase activation. Lysosomal follicul in complex.
    • Alpay Seven (Skiniotis lab) described Quality Control of GPCR.
    • Kyle Lopez (Southworth lab) presented the ClpAP protease structure.

See you soon, Miri