Seeing Tiny Things - A Quick Cryo-EM Course
The first part of my PhD involves some quick classes on a variety of research techniques that could potentially be of help to my future project, or ones I'm just plain interested in. Considering my fan girl tendencies over those strings of amino acids it makes logical sense I would be drawn to an alternative method in structural biology and so a Cryo-EM masterclass answered my call. This was a pretty hands-on class considering the training required for a lot of the steps. After being shown each piece of the microscope we were also rewarded with a running dialogue for the price of each part, as interesting as these numbers were, the undertones of '....so please don't break this' and 'that's why you don't get to play with it' were quite apparent. Once over our financial shocks we were able to experience sample preparation and I got to repeat a challenge I had difficulty with since my MRes project: attempting to determine where the surface of liquid Nitroge...