Time: 12:30 - 1:30pm Speaker: Dr Richard HendersonVenue: Skeel Lecture Theatre
Join our annual Drummond Lecture with Dr Richard Henderson of LMB Cambridge. The lecture is titled 'The increasing power of cryoEM for macromolecular structure determination'. Dr Henderson received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2017 for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution.
He is a molecular biologist and biophysicist who is distinguished for his contributions to protein crystallography — a technique that uses X-rays to determine the structure of molecules. Richard was the first to solve the structure of a protein found in the membrane of a cell.
Using X-rays to analyse bacteriorhodopsin, a light-harvesting protein found in tiny microbes, Richard discovered that it was composed of helices. Then, in collaboration with neuroscientist Nigel Urwin, he uncovered the three-dimensional arrangement of the helices within the bacterial membrane by electron microscopy — pioneering the powerful technique’s use to study biological molecules.
This lecture is free to attend and open to all.