Event

Date:
March 14-15th, 2016
Speaker:
Dr. Juha Huiskonen, Oxford Univ.・STRUBI (UK)・Associate Professor
Title:
"Cryo-EM of Lassa Virus-Low-pH conformations and Receptor Binding of the Glycoprotein Spike" in 2016 Hokkaido Branch of Biophysical Society of Japan and The Japanese Biochemical Society Joint Symposium
"Using Cryo-EM to Understand Complex Macromolecular Assemblies" in 3rd Bimolecular Science Meeting

March 14-15th, 2016
We invited Dr. Juha Huiskonen to discuss this project and give the presentations, entitled “Cryo-EM of Lassa Virus-Low-pH conformations and Receptor Binding of the Glycoprotein Spike” in 2016 Hokkaido Branch of Biophysical Society of Japan and The Japanese Biochemical Society Joint Symposium and “Using Cryo-EM to Understand Complex Macromolecular Assemblies” in 3rd Bimolecular Science Meeting. In former presentation, he talked about his recent results, the conformational change of Glycoprotein of Lassa virus due to low-pH by cryo EM. Furthermore, he also showed the complex structure of glycoprotein and host receptor by cryo-EM. From these results, he proposed the model of Lassa virus entry. It’s expected that these results contribute to the understanding of detail entry mechanism and vaccine development of lassa virus.
In latter presentation, he presented various aspects of cryo-EM from a theoretical background, procedure to analytical method using several macromolecule examples. At the end of presentation, he explained ‘localized reconstruction’ which is the novel method developed by their group and its usefulness for obtaining high-resolution complex structure. This approach enabled us the identification of new important part for the protein-protein interaction of RNA polymerase complex of bacteriophage, which is not identified by conventional X-ray crystallography previouly. We could ask questions even in his presentation, therefore, we easily understood the current situation of cryo-EM.

Both presentations strongly implied the importance of cryo-EM for a protein structural determination, which is a key point of this project.

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