The Ribosome Comes Alive.
This essay is a reflection on the ways the X-ray structures of the ribosome are helping in the interpretation of cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) density maps showing the translating ribosome in motion. Through advances in classification methods, cryo-EM and single-particle reconstruction methods have recently evolved to the point where they can yield an array of structures from a single sample ("story in a sample"), providing snapshots of an entire subprocess of translation, such as translocation or decoding.
Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, Columbia University, 650 West 168th Street, New York, NY 10032, USA and Department of Biological Sciences, Columbia University, 1212 Amsterdam Ave., New York, NY 10027, USA, phone: +1 (0)212 305 9510, fax: +1 (0)212 305 9500.
Joachim
J
Frank