Useful post. I can expand on one point and make a minor correction. Single Particle Cryo-EM is indeed a new(ish) powerful method of protein structure elucidation starting to make an impact in drug design. It is especially useful when a protein cannot easily be crystallised to allow more straightforward X-Ray structure determination. This is usually the case with transmembrane proteins for example. However it is actually best if the protein molecules are completely unaligned in any preferred direction as the simplest application of the refinement software assumes a perfectly random 3D orientation of the many thousands of protein copies imaged on the grid. In practice this is not so easy to achieve and corrections for unwanted preferred orientation need to be made.
Useful post. I can expand on one point and make a minor correction. Single Particle Cryo-EM is indeed a new(ish) powerful method of protein structure elucidation starting to make an impact in drug design. It is especially useful when a protein cannot easily be crystallised to allow more straightforward X-Ray structure determination. This is usually the case with transmembrane proteins for example. However it is actually best if the protein molecules are completely unaligned in any preferred direction as the simplest application of the refinement software assumes a perfectly random 3D orientation of the many thousands of protein copies imaged on the grid. In practice this is not so easy to achieve and corrections for unwanted preferred orientation need to be made.
That’s true; I misremembered that part when I wrote it. I’ll just remove that.