The At­las of Cell Struc­ture

by Roberto

Our knowl­edge of the struc­ture of mi­cro­bial cells just keeps get­ting bet­ter as the res­o­lu­tion of imag­ing tech­niques con­tin­ues to in­crease. A key player in this rapidly evolv­ing tech­no­lo­gi­cal field is cryo-elec­tron to­mog­ra­phy (cry­oET) which, aided by pow­er­ful com­pu­ta­tional tools, al­lows for the gen­er­a­tion of three-di­men­sional im­ages of whole mi­cro­bial cells. And when it comes to sub­cel­lu­lar or­ganelles, the res­o­lu­tion is nearly at the level of in­di­vid­ual atoms. It is no sur­prise that Christoph could barely stay put on his seat when he first saw a 3D ren­der­ing of mag­ne­to­somes, as he de­scribed in a prior post. And in that post, Christoph intro­duced STC read­ers to a re­mark­able com­pendium of cry­oET im­ages of mi­cro­bial cells: "The At­las of Bac­te­r­ial and Ar­chaeal Cell Struc­ture" by Cather­ine Oikonomou and Grant Jensen. Therein, the au­thors present the im­ages ac­quired by nu­mer­ous in­ves­ti­ga­tors, ac­com­pa­nied by ex­plana­tory text, and even an au­di­ble track. In my opin­ion, this open ac­cess dig­i­tal text­book should be a com­pan­ion to every stu­dent of mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy. Not only will they ac­quaint them­selves with di­verse cel­lu­lar fea­tures, but they'll also get a chance to mar­vel at the "real data."

Cryo-ET im­age of Methanospir­il­lum hun­gatei, high­lighted are ri­bo­somes, cy­to­plas­mic mem­brane, and sur­face layer. Source

By its very na­ture, re­vised and ex­panded ver­sions of this text­book can be gen­er­ated re­la­tive­ly of­ten. The most re­cent ver­sion, re­leased last month, in­cludes ma­jor ad­di­tions that make the text par­tic­u­larly use­ful for teach­ing. These in­clude an­i­mated videos il­lus­trat­ing di­verse imag­ing meth­ods, such as light mi­croscopy, flu­o­res­cence mi­croscopy, scan­ning EM, trans­mis­sion EM, cryo-EM, cryo-ET, and X‑ray crys­tal­log­ra­phy as well as a down­load­able re­view packet. I whole­heart­edly rec­om­mend this won­der­ful and ever-im­prov­ing re­source to any­one in­ter­ested in div­ing into and teach­ing about bac­te­r­ial and ar­chaeal cell struc­ture through the win­dow of cry­oET!

 

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