The IKI at Ben-Gurion University is looking for a Staff Scientist to join our CryoEM Unit.
If you’re passionate about #SPA and #CryoET, this is a rare opportunity to work in an amazing environment with top-tier science and even better collaborators (myself included! 😉).
The Tech:
We have a 200 keV Glacios running now, with a Titan Krios and Hydra PFIB-SEM coming soon. This is world-class infrastructure dedicated to supporting the structural biology community.
Meharry Medical College Ph.D. candidate KeAndreya Morrison's highlight features a @Nature Structural & Molecular Biology publication from the lab of Chi-Min Ho of Columbia University and colleagues who used cryo-electron tomography to map malaria’s ribosomes at work and reveal how a parasite-specific drug derails translation.
Read more here: https://medium.com/sbgrid-community-news/stopping-ribosomes-in-action-101e95f41784
One highlight from Friday that I forgot: Alister Burt's talk on his efforts to build #TeamTomo, a set of community-supported software packages and metadata standards for #cryoET. This is difficult work, and less rewarding for those in academia, but so essential. It's great to see progress on this front.
The other great news from Alister's talk: Warp is now supported on Linux!
Finally, I'll remember his advice "think about geometry, and use it if you can" when assigning initial particle orientations for subtomogram averaging.
As we continue our #polaroidproject at #biologists100, we now feature Matteo Allegretti ✨
Matteo is presenting work on the macromolecular architecture of male germ nuclei - part of which can be found as a preprint on #bioRxiv
#preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.10.30.620797v2
Nuclear pore complexes (NPCs) are nuclear gateways which regulate the transit of molecules larger than 40kDa through a Ran-dependent transport[1][1]. The somatic human NPC scaffold consists of three stacked rings: the cytoplasmic (CR), the nucleoplasmic (NR), and the inner ring (IR), which define a central channel approximately 55nm wide[2][2]. Although many studies have investigated human NPC architecture[3][3], it remains largely unknown how the NPC accommodates the different functions of non-somatic cells. Here, we reveal the in-cell architecture of the human sperm NPC. We show that it exhibits a central channel less than 40nm-wide, outlined exclusively by the IR. This structural alteration is accompanied by a six-fold reduction in nuclear diffusion rate and mis-localization of Ran-dependent transport components. Additionally, we identify a network of septin filaments interconnecting NPCs within the inter-membrane space of the nuclear envelope (NE), suggesting a potential mechanical role in channel constriction. Furthermore, our human tissue imaging data indicate meiosis as a pivotal differentiation stage driving architectural changes to the NPC. Given the critical role of the IR for successful spermatogenesis[4][4],[5][5], our work offers important insight into this fundamental biological process. Our study also demonstrates the power of an integrative approach by combining electron-cryo- tomography, super-resolution-light-microscopy and biochemical analysis, to elucidate macromolecular structure-function relations in human physiological contexts. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. [1]: #ref-1 [2]: #ref-2 [3]: #ref-3 [4]: #ref-4 [5]: #ref-5
Itamar Kass 
eLife
Pietro Roversi
SBGrid
BenjaminHimes
Guillaume Gaullier
preLights
Amelia Cervera 🧬