Professor Joachim Frank is a German-born American biochemist who won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work on image-processing techniques that proved essential to the development of cryo-electron microscopy. He shared the prize with Swiss biophysicist Jacques Dubochet and British molecular biologist Richard Henderson.

Lecture abstract

Cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) has transformed the way we can study biological molecules as it enables us to determine structure of molecules freely suspended in solution (as “single particles”), and to gauge the way they change their shape as they interact with one another in the cell during life processes. Thus cryo-EM has evolved to become a major technique in drug design. Most recently it has contributed in a crucial way to the development of vaccines and cures for COVID-19 and other pandemics.

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