Andreas Korinek and Ahmad Jomaa at work!

Collecting electron microscopy images at the Ortega lab just got easier. The team is now using a computer program installed in one of the high-end electron microscopes at the Canadian Center for Electron Microscopy (CCEM) that makes the microscope collect images automatically. The man behind the magic is Andreas Korinek, a postdoctoral fellow from Germany that joined the lab this past summer. Andreas did his PhD at the Max Planck Institute and during his graduate work he developed this program that virtually transforms the electron microscope in a high-throughput instrument.

“Cryo-electron microscopy is tricky and it frequently takes the entire day to get a good grid in the microscope, but once you have it, you want to collect as much data as possible. Andreas program allows that once a good grid is in, you can press a button and go home. We used to stay here until 1 or 2 am when images were collected manually…” comments Ahmad Jomaa one of the senior students in the lab.

The system collects datasets much bigger than what is possible by hand. This huge datasets allow obtaining 3D reconstructions of large protein assemblies at high resolution. Very frequently, many of these complexes coexist in several conformations within the same sample. These large data sets allow exploring this conformational variability. “You simply don’t have enough data to obtain a 3D reconstruction of the complex in all these conformations with manually collected datasets”, argues Joaquin Ortega.

“One cool feature we are implementing is that the images that the microscope is collecting could be visualized from your cell phone or laptop computer at home as they come out from the microscope. This feature will allow monitoring the data collection from virtually anywhere …” indicates Andreas.

Andreas’ program is now making the microscope at the CCEM to work night and weekends shifts but finally … the Ortega lab members got a life!