Topic summary

Cryogenic electron microscopy

Cryogenic electron microscopy

Extracted from the Wikipedia article Cryo-electron microscopy.

Cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) is a transmission electron microscopy technique applied to samples cooled to cryogenic temperatures. Developed in the 1970s, advances in detector technology and software allow biomolecular structures to be imaged at near-atomic resolution. The approach has become a popular alternative to X-ray crystallography or NMR spectroscopy in structural biology.