CCM Colloquium: Alberto Bartesaghi (Duke University)

Wednesday Oct 19, 2022, 10:00 AM → 11:00 AM America/New_York

3rd Floor Classroom/3-Flatiron Institute (162 5th Avenue)

Title: Imaging proteins within crowded cells using cryo-ET: advances and remaining computational challenges

Tomographic reconstruction of frozen-hydrated specimens
followed by extraction and averaging of sub-tomograms has been
successfully used to determine the structure of macromolecules in their native cellular environment at resolutions that are high enough to
reveal molecular level interactions. Recent technological advances in
the field have raised interesting computational challenges in the area
of tomographic reconstruction and inverse problems more broadly. In this talk, I will present emergent topics in cryo-electron tomography (ET) and high-resolution sub-tomogram averaging that are helping to drive the “cryo-ET revolution”. The combination of strategies for high-throughput acquisition of tilt-series with data-driven constrained single-particle tomography analysis, is paving the way for cryo-ET to become a powerful strategy to determine protein structures within native cellular environments at high resolution.

Bio: Dr. Bartesaghi received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer
Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 2005 and was an
Associate Scientist with the Center for Cancer Research, Laboratory of
Cell Biology at the NCI/NIH until 2017. In 2018, he joined the
Departments of Computer Science and Biochemistry at Duke University as an Associate Professor where he also co-directs the Structural Biology Core of the Duke Center for HIV Structural Biology. His research is centered around the development of machine learning, computer vision, and image analysis algorithms aimed at solving the structure of macromolecular complexes of biomedical importance using single particle cryo-EM, cryo-electron tomography, and sub-volume averaging. During his career, he solved the structures of over 120 important biomolecules including CRISPR/Cas9 complexes, GPCR/G-protein complexes, targets for cancer drugs, HIV-1/SARS glyco-proteins and complexes involved in neurodegenerative diseases.

 

If you would like to attend, please email crampersad@flatironinstitute.org for the Zoom details.