May 6 became a historic day at the Life Sciences Center - after a complete installation and tuning up of the transmission microscope with the cooling function Cryo-TEM Glacios, the structure of the apoferitin protein was obtained and the representation of this structure in 3 Åresolution was submitted.
The structure of this protein is symmetrical, it resembles a ball, which is why it was chosen to train the structural biology team that conducted the study. The team that worked on this training study is Giedrė Tamulaitienė, Giedrius Sasnauskas and Elena Manakova as well as Ieva Drulytė, consultant from Thermofisher Scientific.
"And it has to be said that the 'training flight' went great, all the procedures from sample preparation to data acquisition, analysis and structure generation were done by researchers at our Life Sciences Center. This means that we are now ready to embark on much more complex protein structures that are more difficult to study using classical structural biology methods. Cryo-TEM Glacios microscope is unique and one of the most expensive research instruments installed in Lithuania this year. Its price is 2.5 million euros. This instrument was acquired using EU funds, which are used to create the CossyBIO open access center for modern instruments at VU LSC, " Dr Gintaras Valinčius, Director of Life SciencesCenter said.