The Villa Lab develops tools to observe macromolecular complexes in their natural environment, the cell. Our ultimate goal is to unveil the structural dynamics of these complexes while they go about their everyday life. We combine cell biology and electron microscopy to generate data, and we use image processing and physical modeling to understand these data.
Josh’s paper
Josh’s PhD paper is now published in Nature Communications.
Tom’s LSRF
Tom is awarded a fellowship by the Life Sciences Research Foundation, sponsored by the Simons Foundation. Congratulations Tom!
NanoPop
Our paper in collaboration with the Shapiro lab was posted to bioRxiv. This work deciphers the molecular grammar of the bacterial protein PopZ in forming phase-separated compartments, and uses PopZ as a synthetic tool in human cells. Vinson used cryo-ET to show that altering protein domain composition changes structural order of the compartments and affects ribosome distribution in cells.
Vinson’s chapter
Vinson’s chapter titled “Practical Approaches for Cryo-FIB Milling and Applications for Cellular Cryo-Electron Tomography” is published as part of the cryoEM. Methods in Molecular Biology book edited by Tamir Gonen and Brent Nannenga. It has a lot of useful tips and we hope it will help #democratizecryoET.