The technique of electron microscopy (EM) has been fundamental to muscle research since the days of Huxley and Hanson. Direct observation of how proteins in the sarcomere are arranged and visualising the changes that occur upon activation have greatly increased our understanding of function. In the 1980s specimen preparation techniques for biological EM moved away from traditional fixing and staining. The technique known as cryo-electron microscopy (Cryo-EM) was developed, which involves rapidly freezing proteins in liquid ethane which maintains them in a near native state. Within the last 5 years there has been a step change in the achievable resolution using Cryo-EM. This ‘resolution revolution’ can be attributed to advances in detector technology, microscope automation and maximum likelihood image processing. In this article we look at how Cryo-EM has contributed to the field of muscle research in this post revolution era, focussing on recently published high resolution structures of sarcomeric proteins.

中文翻译：

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革命之后：Cryo-EM如何促进肌肉研究？

自赫x黎（Huxley）和汉森（Hanson）时代以来，电子显微镜（EM）技术一直是肌肉研究的基础。直接观察肌小节中蛋白质的排列方式并可视化激活后发生的变化，极大地增加了我们对功能的理解。在1980年代，用于生物EM的标本制备技术已脱离传统的固定和染色技术。开发了一种称为“冷冻电子显微镜”（Cryo-EM）的技术，该技术涉及在液态乙烷中快速冷冻蛋白质，从而将蛋白质保持在接近天然状态。在过去的5年中，使用Cryo-EM可以实现的分辨率有了很大的变化。这种“分辨率革命”可以归因于探测器技术，显微镜自动化和最大似然图像处理方面的进步。