PRIZES AND AWARDS
Lennart Nilsson Award is awarded to Alexey Amunts Alexey Amunts is the recipient of the 2016 Lennart Nilsson Award for his pioneering work in the ongoing “Resolution Revolution” using electron cryogenic microscopy (cryo-EM) to visualize structures of individual proteins in biological materials.
ABOUT THE PRIZE
Photo: Shintaro Aibara.
The Lennart Nilsson Award is the world’s top accolade in scientific and medical photography. The award was inaugurated in 1998 in honour of Swedish medical photographer Lennart Nilsson, who achieved worldwide recognition for his images. The prize is awarded each year to individuals who make an outstanding contribution to scientific photography “in the spirit of Lennart Nilsson”.
Alexey Amunts is the head of the national cryo-EM laboratory at SciLifeLab and assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at Stockholm University. He and his colleagues were first to tease out the atomic resolution structure of the protein complex regulating a cell’s energy budget and known as the mitoribosome. To get the high-resolution information, Amunts uses cryo-EM, a technique that bombards biological samples with a highly focused electron beam at very cold temperatures (frozen in liquid nitrogen, at about minus 200 degrees Celsius). As the electrons pass through, they interact with the biological sample and scatter, producing projection images. By combining information from hundreds of thousands projections, researchers can recreate the original biological structure, which is essential in order to understand its cellular function and the mechanism of action. Amunts and his team have further applied the methodology to the mitoribosome bound to potentially novel therapeutic compounds. They achieved the first atomic depiction of drug bound mitoribosome, which opens up promising perspectives for structure-based drug design approach by cryo-EM that will make the quest for novel therapeutic interventions much more tractable.
Image of the 3D reconstruction of the mitoribosome obtained through a computational analysis of cryo-EM data. The reconstruction serves as a ‘density map’ into which Amunts and his team fit about 200,000 atoms, like a jigsaw puzzle that when assembled correctly, reveals a complete atomic model. The zoomed in region illustrates that apart from the mitoribosome atoms, an extra density is found (shown as a blue mesh). This density corresponds to a pharmaceutical compound that binds to mitoribosome and have a potential for anticancer treatment.
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FROM CELL TO SOCIETY 2016