Wah Chiu

The Stanford-SLAC Cryo-EM Center will host an advanced cryo-EM image processing workshop.

Disabling those hinges could be a good strategy for designing vaccines and treatments against a broad range of coronavirus infections.

Taking pictures of tiny, flash-frozen things with electrons is revolutionizing biology and technology. SLAC and Stanford host one of the world’s leading facilities for doing cryo-EM research, improving the technology and making it available to researchers across the country.

SLAC and Stanford scientists used it to zoom in on an iconic RNA catalyst and a piece of viral RNA that’s a potential target for COVID-19 treatments.

The study, done on a mild-mannered relative of the virus that causes COVID-19, paves the way for seeing more clearly how spike proteins initiate infections, with an eye to preventing and treating them.

No human cell can function without these tiny machines, which cause disease when they go haywire and offer potential targets for therapeutic drugs.