LSI Seminar Series: Elizabeth R. Wright, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison
Developing correlative cryo-EM technologies to support in situ structural biology
Cells are ubiquitous to all living organisms. Cells are either ‘simple’ in their singularity or are the ‘building blocks’ of complex multi-cellular communities. Many advances in microscopy, especially cryo-microscopy techniques, have allowed researchers to begin to investigate the finite detail of cells, organelles and macromolecules within these proverbial ‘bags of enzymes.’ Cryo-electron tomography combined with other imaging modalities, including fluorescence light microscopy and focused ion beam-scanning electron microscopy, have supported a new renaissance in cell biology. These technologies are still novel, however, and workflows, software and hardware are undergoing rapid developments to improve specimen preservation, imaging and data processing and analysis. In this presentation, I will describe some of the developments underway in our laboratory and how we apply them to complex biological systems.
Speaker
Elizabeth Wright is a structural biologist with more than 20 years of expertise in cryo-EM, cryo-ET, genetic engineering, microbiology, and protein expression and purification. The overarching goals of her research program are to determine the structures of protein assemblies, several bacterial species, selected bacteriophages, HIV-1, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), measles virus (MeV), eukaryotic cells and tissue, and other biological systems that define the structure-function relationships that mediate diseases associated with protein misfolding and aggregation, cell function and development, and bacterial and viral infectivity and pathogenesis. To enable the biological discoveries of the research group and broader imaging community, her lab simultaneously develops and uses state-of-the-art correlative microscopy methods, cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET), and novel imaging processing approaches.
In 2018, Wright joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a professor in the Department of Biochemistry to establish, build and direct a new internationally respected Cryo-EM Research Center (CEMRC). She has been awarded an NIH U24 grant to build the NIH Network HUB for the NIH Network of Cryo-ET Service Centers, the Midwest Center for Cryo-ET (MCCET), a second independent cryo-EM/cryo-ET research center at UW-Madison.