Biochem boffins win the Nobel Prize for cryo-electron microscopy The 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to a trio of researchers that have developed a new technique that captures three dimensional images of biological molecules. Jacques Dubochet, an honorary professor at the Swiss University of Lausanne, Joachim Frank, a professor at New York's Columbia University and Richard …
Which sounds pretty astonishing all on its own, as it implies you have less of a signal from the solvent (water) to remove before you get to the unscrambling the data from the proteins .
Impressive stuff.
And £900k buys a fair amount of rollmop Herring as well.
If you want to start a boffin pissing context, ask what the kilovoltage is. 200 kV is ok but the big guns have got 300 kV machines donchaknow. And it needs a fancy vibration proof lab to work in, not to mention liquid ethane freezing systems for the samples, so you're looking at £M to get it going.
There is an IT angle too. The contrast of the protein signal against the water is very low so you need to collect hundreds or thousands of images and then reconstruct your particle structures, so its a HPC job.
Yep, I believe the lab at the LMB has a 2.5k core cluster dedicated to it. (This was a couple of years ago that I heard this, they may have expanded since.
Nvidia have ported some of the key codes to GPU, we stuck a load of GPUs in for our CryoEM scientists and a PB or so of Lustre for scratch.
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