Former PhD Student Simon Fromm Awarded JSB Paper of the Year 2018

A former EMBL PhD student of the Sachse laboratory (now ER-C-3), Simon Fromm, has received the Paper of the Year 2018 award from the Journal of Structural Biology. The article presents a detailed technical account of emerging issues upon the introduction of new hardware in the early days of direct electron detectors.

The study helped to establish routines for determining near-atomic resolution structures up to 3 Å. The 3.4 Å resolution TMV map also showed that single-particle based helical reconstruction is a powerful approach that in the meantime, other popular image processing packages have successfully included in their pipeline for structure determination.

Paper-of-the-Year Award 2018
Figure 1: Cross-section of TMV cryo-EM density at 3.4 Å resolution. The corresponding publication appeared in Journal of Structural Biology (JSB) (Fromm et al., 2015) and was recently honored by the JSB Paper-of-the-Year Award 2018. The map and the corresponding PDB structure from the paper (EMD-2842, PDB 4udv) served in the model challenge organized by the EM databank as a helical reference structure for testing and evaluating new algorithms for atomic model refinement using cryo-EM maps.
Copyright:
— 2018 Carsten Sachse

In addition, the scientists also examined pertaining issues such as beam-induced motion and side-chain specific radiation damage, which became traceable due to the use of movie mode direct electron detectors. For this investigation, the paper relied on the particular test specimen TMV used by many other colleagues since the 1930s in an effort to advance the methods of biological structure determination. Simon Fromm received the prize at the end of 2018 and is currently pursuing his postdoctoral work at UC Berkeley in the USA.

The Paper of the Year Award is conferred annually by the Journal of Structural Biology and Elsevier to young scientists, either postdoctoral fellows within their first 4 years or graduate students, who were first or co‐first authors of an exceptional research article that appeared in the journal in the preceding three years.

A short editorial of the paper can be found here.

Original Publication:

Simon A. Fromm, Tanmay A.M. Bharat, Arjen J. Jakobi, Wim J.H. Hagen, Carsten Sachse.
Seeing tobacco mosaic virus through direct electron detectors, J Struct Biol. 2015;189(2):87-97

Last Modified: 25.02.2022