Cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) is a rapidly emerging technology for structural biology. While excitement and demand for the technology are high, the pace of training cryo-EM practitioners lags far behind. There are two major hurdles to the development of effective training programs: (1) potential learners come from a wide range of backgrounds and career stages, from graduate students to established structural biologists; and (2) learning cryo-EM requires many hours of hands-on ?behind the wheel? training on specialized, expensive equipment that is often unavailable to learners at their home institutions. While some hands-on training schools exist for cryo-EM, they train only a handful of students a year, while demand for the technique requires orders of magnitude more. Workshops enroll more students, but are too short to teach all the necessary theory and lack a hands-on component. To train a skilled workforce of cryo-EM practitioners, here I propose the framework for a comprehensive online curriculum, based on my successful ?Getting Started in Cryo-EM? video lectures, covering the theory and practice of all major cryo-EM modalities. The curriculum will target two groups: (1) the growing number of non-practitioners who want to learn about cryo-EM but will not operate a microscope themselves and (2) future cryo-EM practitioners. For non-practitioners such as professors who want to add a discussion of cryo-EM to their courses, I will develop four ?Teacher Packs,? containing video lectures and associated instructor resources (flipped class discussion questions, review slides, homework problems, and exam questions), each targeted to a different course format. For practitioners, together with Matthijn Vos and Tamir Gonen I will develop modular ?Units? of theoretical and lab demonstration videos, accompanied by training manuals and certification tests. Units will cover general cryo-EM theory and operation, single-particle reconstruction, tomography, micro-electron diffraction / electron crystallography, and advanced topics and troubleshooting for facility managers, and can be combined to meet the specific needs of the learner. In conjunction with supervised training at a user's home facility or cryo-EM service center, the curriculum will offer everything a student needs to understand the theory of, and begin practicing, their desired cryo-EM technique.

Public Health Relevance

Understanding the structures of cellular proteins is critical to understanding their functions and, for proteins that cause disease, designing drugs to block those functions. Cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) is a key emerging technology for solving protein structures; unfortunately, the pace of its development has outstripped the training of scientists who can use it. Here we propose development of a curriculum that will vastly increase the number of expert cryo-EM researchers available to apply its power to a range of biological and biomedical problems.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Eye Institute (NEI)
Type
Education Projects (R25)
Project #
5R25EY029128-02
Application #
9691362
Study Section
Special Emphasis Panel (ZRG1)
Program Officer
Araj, Houmam H
Project Start
2018-05-01
Project End
2021-04-30
Budget Start
2019-05-01
Budget End
2020-04-30
Support Year
2
Fiscal Year
2019
Total Cost
Indirect Cost
Name
California Institute of Technology
Department
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
009584210
City
Pasadena
State
CA
Country
United States
Zip Code
91125