Three scientists win Nobel Prize in Chemistry

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson for the development of cryo-electron microscopy, which both simplifies and improves the imaging of biomolecules.

They won the prize for "for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution", the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said while announcing the award here on Wednesday.

"This method has moved biochemistry into a new era," the Academy said. The works of Dubochet, affiliated with University of Lausanne in Switzerland, Frank with Columbia University in New York and Henderson with MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Britain paved the way for imaging 3D structures of biomolecules.

Electron microscopes were long believed to only be suitable for imaging dead matter because the powerful electron beam destroys biological material.But in 1990, Henderson succeeded in using an electron microscope to generate a three-dimensional image of a protein at atomic resolution. This breakthrough proved the technology's potential. Frank made the technology generally applicable. Between 1975 and 1986 he developed an image processing method in which the electron microscope's fuzzy two dimensional images are analysed and merged to reveal a sharp....Read More