Event details
Presenters
Elizabeth Villa
Professor of Molecular Biology
University of California, San Diego
Elizabeth Villa, Ph.D. is a Professor of Molecular Biology in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of California San Diego and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. She completed her PhD in Biophysics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a Fulbright Fellow. She was a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Munich. She was recruited to UC San Diego in 2014.
Dr. Villa was the recipient of an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award to pursue high-risk high-reward research developing cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) and new technological and computational techniques to advance structural cell biology. She was named a Pew Scholar in 2017, and was selected to become a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in 2021.
Gaia Pigino
Associate Head of the Structural Biology Center
Human Technopole, Italy
Tanmay Bharat
MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, UK
Molecules at the surface of cells modulate all interactions of the organism with its environment, so this research helps inform us about key cellular processes such as adhesion, biofilm formation and antibiotic tolerance in pathogenic bacteria. After studying Chemistry at the University of Delhi, Tanmay read Biological Sciences at University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Tanmay completed his PhD at EMBL Heidelberg, before moving to the LMB as an EMBO/FEBS long-term fellow.
Tanmay was a Group Leader at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford from 2017-2022. Since 2022, Tanmay has become a programme leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology.
Recently Tanmay’s research on prokaryotic surface layers and biofilms has been recognised with a 2018 Vallee Research Scholarship, the 2019 EMBL John Kendrew Award, the 2020 Philip Leverhulme Prize for Biological Sciences, 2021 Eppendorf Award for Young European Investigators, the 2021 Lister Prize, the 2022 Colworth Medal from the Biochemical Society, and the 2023 Fleming Prize of the Microbiology Society.
Ben Engel
Assistant Professor
University of Basel, Switzerland
Ben Engel received his bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley and performed his Ph.D. studies with Wallace Marshall at the University of California, San Francisco. After spending the first three decades of his life in the Bay Area, he said goodbye to USA, and moved to Munich, Germany. From 2011 to 2019, he was a postdoc and project group leader in the department of Wolfgang Baumeister at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry. In 2019, he started an independent research group at the Helmholtz Pioneer Campus on the Helmholtz Munich campus. In 2022, the Engel lab moved to the Biozentrum at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Ben is currently an assistant professor and a member of the EMBO Young Investigator Program.
To learn more about the group and research, visit the Engel lab website:
Peijun Zhang
University of Oxford, UK
She received B.S. in Electrical Engineering and M.S. in Solid State Physics from Nanjing University, and Ph.D. in Biophysics and Physiology from University Virginia. Professor Zhang is a leading expert in the fields cryoEM and cryo-electron tomography of molecular complexes and assemblies, especially investigating these in situ in the native cellular context.
Her research is aimed at an integrated, atomistic understanding of molecular mechanisms of virus and bacterial infections by developing and applying novel technologies for high-resolution cryoEM and cryo-electron tomography, combined with complementary computational and biophysical/biochemical methods. Her current research efforts focus on HIV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 infections using multi-scale correlative and integrative cellular structural biology and bacterial chemotaxis signalling pathways using time-resolved cryoEM/ET.
Steven Ludtke
Professor of Structural Biology
Baylor College of Medicine
Dr. Ludtke studied Physics as an undergraduate at Caltech, before moving to Experimental and Computational Biophysics in the Physics Department at Rice University for his PhD. Along with his initial faculty appointment, for roughly 15 years he served as co-director of the National Center for Macromolecular Imaging, a long standing P41 center at Baylor College of Medicine, directed by Wah Chiu.
After Dr. Chiu's departure for Stanford in 2017, he and Dr. Zhao Wang transitioned the facility to become one of BCM's Advanced Technical Cores. The other major driver of Dr. Ludtke's career has been open source scientific software development.
For the last 25 years Dr. Ludtke and his group have been developing the EMAN/EMAN2 software suites for CryoEM and CryoET data analysis. EMAN2 has been used in a significant fraction of the structures in the EMDatabank, and is distributed as a standard installation on most CryoEM/ET workstations.
Over the last decade EMAN2 has expanded rapidly into deep learning based approaches to study conformational and compositional variability both in CryoEM and cellular CryoET as well as other image processing tasks. Due to the diverse cellular interactions most molecules participate in, the level of heterogeneity for any given molecular species within the cell can be considerable, and traditional particle classification methods do a poor job in characterizing these complex interactions.
These methods can also provide significant insights into the entropic neighborhoods explored by many macromolecules even in-vitro.
Grant Jensen
Dean of the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences
Brigham Young University, US
Juergen Plitzko
Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, Germany
Juergen Plitzko studied mineralogy and physics at the University of Tuebingen, Germany, and conducted his PhD research from 1994 to 1998 at the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research, Stuttgart, Germany. His first postdoctoral position was at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA, from 1999 to 2002. In 2002, he moved from materials to life sciences and joined Wolfgang Baumeisters' Department of Molecular Structural Biology at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, first as a postdoc and later as head of Wolfgang's EM group. In 2012, he was appointed full professor at the Bijvoet Center for Biomolecular Research at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and consulting group leader at CEITEC, Central European Institute of Technology, at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. Since 2016, Jürgen Plitzko has been a permanent research group leader for cryo-EM technology at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany.
Allison Doerr
Jeffrey Perkel
Rita Strack
Agenda for the day
Times are displayed in BST
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Available On Demand
KEYNOTE TALK - Opening Windows into the Cell: Bringing structure into cell biology using cryo-electron tomography
Elizabeth Villa Professor of Molecular Biology University of California, San DiegoElizabeth Villa, Ph.D. is a Professor of Molecular Biology in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of California San Diego and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. She completed her PhD in Biophysics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a Fulbright Fellow. She was a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Munich. She was recruited to UC San Diego in 2014.
Dr. Villa was the recipient of an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award to pursue high-risk high-reward research developing cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) and new technological and computational techniques to advance structural cell biology. She was named a Pew Scholar in 2017, and was selected to become a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in 2021.
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Available On Demand
En route to the molecular anatomy of whole organisms using cryo-elctron tomography
Juergen Plitzko Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, GermanyJuergen Plitzko studied mineralogy and physics at the University of Tuebingen, Germany, and conducted his PhD research from 1994 to 1998 at the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research, Stuttgart, Germany. His first postdoctoral position was at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA, from 1999 to 2002. In 2002, he moved from materials to life sciences and joined Wolfgang Baumeisters' Department of Molecular Structural Biology at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, first as a postdoc and later as head of Wolfgang's EM group. In 2012, he was appointed full professor at the Bijvoet Center for Biomolecular Research at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and consulting group leader at CEITEC, Central European Institute of Technology, at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. Since 2016, Jürgen Plitzko has been a permanent research group leader for cryo-EM technology at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany.
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Available On Demand
Talk 2
Gaia Pigino Associate Head of the Structural Biology Center Human Technopole, Italy -
Available On Demand
Electron tomography of prokaryotic cell surfaces
Tanmay Bharat MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, UKTanmay Bharat’s research focuses on studying cell surfaces of prokaryotes, including bacteria and archaea, at the atomic level by using electron tomography in combination with other structural and cell biology techniques.
Molecules at the surface of cells modulate all interactions of the organism with its environment, so this research helps inform us about key cellular processes such as adhesion, biofilm formation and antibiotic tolerance in pathogenic bacteria. After studying Chemistry at the University of Delhi, Tanmay read Biological Sciences at University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Tanmay completed his PhD at EMBL Heidelberg, before moving to the LMB as an EMBO/FEBS long-term fellow.
Tanmay was a Group Leader at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford from 2017-2022. Since 2022, Tanmay has become a programme leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology.
Recently Tanmay’s research on prokaryotic surface layers and biofilms has been recognised with a 2018 Vallee Research Scholarship, the 2019 EMBL John Kendrew Award, the 2020 Philip Leverhulme Prize for Biological Sciences, 2021 Eppendorf Award for Young European Investigators, the 2021 Lister Prize, the 2022 Colworth Medal from the Biochemical Society, and the 2023 Fleming Prize of the Microbiology Society. -
Available On Demand
Charting the molecular topology of membranes inside cells with cryo-ET
Ben Engel Assistant Professor University of Basel, SwitzerlandBen Engel received his bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley and performed his Ph.D. studies with Wallace Marshall at the University of California, San Francisco. After spending the first three decades of his life in the Bay Area, he said goodbye to USA, and moved to Munich, Germany. From 2011 to 2019, he was a postdoc and project group leader in the department of Wolfgang Baumeister at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry. In 2019, he started an independent research group at the Helmholtz Pioneer Campus on the Helmholtz Munich campus. In 2022, the Engel lab moved to the Biozentrum at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Ben is currently an assistant professor and a member of the EMBO Young Investigator Program.
To learn more about the group and research, visit the Engel lab website:
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Available On Demand
In situ structures of macromolecular assemblies by cryo-fib and cryo-et
Peijun Zhang University of Oxford, UKDr. Peijun Zhang is a Professor of Structural Biology in the Nuffield Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford and the founding director of eBIC (the UK National Electron Bio-imaging Centre) at the Diamond Light Source.
She received B.S. in Electrical Engineering and M.S. in Solid State Physics from Nanjing University, and Ph.D. in Biophysics and Physiology from University Virginia. Professor Zhang is a leading expert in the fields cryoEM and cryo-electron tomography of molecular complexes and assemblies, especially investigating these in situ in the native cellular context.
Her research is aimed at an integrated, atomistic understanding of molecular mechanisms of virus and bacterial infections by developing and applying novel technologies for high-resolution cryoEM and cryo-electron tomography, combined with complementary computational and biophysical/biochemical methods. Her current research efforts focus on HIV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 infections using multi-scale correlative and integrative cellular structural biology and bacterial chemotaxis signalling pathways using time-resolved cryoEM/ET. -
Available On Demand
Molecular Variability in CryoET using Deep Learning GMMs
Steven Ludtke Professor of Structural Biology Baylor College of MedicineDr. Ludtke is the Charles C. Bell Jr., Professor of Structural Biology in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Baylor College of Medicine. He also serves as Academic Director of the CryoEM/ET Core and Deputy Director of BCM's overall ATC Program.
Dr. Ludtke studied Physics as an undergraduate at Caltech, before moving to Experimental and Computational Biophysics in the Physics Department at Rice University for his PhD. Along with his initial faculty appointment, for roughly 15 years he served as co-director of the National Center for Macromolecular Imaging, a long standing P41 center at Baylor College of Medicine, directed by Wah Chiu.
After Dr. Chiu's departure for Stanford in 2017, he and Dr. Zhao Wang transitioned the facility to become one of BCM's Advanced Technical Cores. The other major driver of Dr. Ludtke's career has been open source scientific software development.
For the last 25 years Dr. Ludtke and his group have been developing the EMAN/EMAN2 software suites for CryoEM and CryoET data analysis. EMAN2 has been used in a significant fraction of the structures in the EMDatabank, and is distributed as a standard installation on most CryoEM/ET workstations.
Over the last decade EMAN2 has expanded rapidly into deep learning based approaches to study conformational and compositional variability both in CryoEM and cellular CryoET as well as other image processing tasks. Due to the diverse cellular interactions most molecules participate in, the level of heterogeneity for any given molecular species within the cell can be considerable, and traditional particle classification methods do a poor job in characterizing these complex interactions.
These methods can also provide significant insights into the entropic neighborhoods explored by many macromolecules even in-vitro. -
Available On Demand
KEYNOTE TALK: Electron cryotomography of cells: progress and potential
Grant Jensen Dean of the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences Brigham Young University, USGrant Jensen is Dean of the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah. He earned his doctorate working on electron microscopy of RNA polymerase with Dr. Roger Kornberg at Stanford University, and did his post-doctoral work in cryo-EM with Dr. Kenneth Downing at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. There his interests expanded to include electron cryo-tomography of whole cells. Grant began his independent career at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2002. At Caltech his research focused on three main areas: the ultrastructure of small cells, the structural biology of HIV, and the further development of cryo-EM technology. In 2020 Grant moved to BYU to serve as Dean. Together with his colleagues he has now published over 200 papers. Among his most prominent discoveries has been the structure and function of the bacterial type VI secretion system, a "poison-tipped spring-loaded molecular dagger," and the architecture of the type IV pilus responsible for cell motility. Much of his work is now summarized in an electronic textbook, the Atlas of Bacterial and Archaeal Cell Structure (https://www.cellstructureatlas.org/). Grant’s teaching has centered on biophysical methods, including the creation of the popular online course Getting Started in Cryo-EM (http://cryo-em-course.caltech.edu/).
