Chilled-down views of biomolecules win chemistry Nobel Prize for international trio

This year’s Nobel Prize for chemistry recognizes the invention of cryo-electron microscopy, a method for chilling down biomolecules to produce less jittery, more precise pictures of them. “This method has moved biochemistry to a new era,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said today. Cryo-EM has helped researchers figure out how the Zika virus is structured and how salmonella bacteria attack cells. The $1.1 million prize will be shared by Jacques Dubochet of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, Joachim Frank of Columbia University, and Richard Henderson of Cambridge’s MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Britain.