From Molecules to Cells: EM Innovations in Life Sciences at the Crick

A day of EM, old friends and new discoveries

Some meetings leave you with new ideas, others remind you why scientific communities matter. The EM Symposium at the Francis Crick Institute managed to do both.

I had the pleasure of presenting our recent work in a talk entitled Prions at near-atomic resolution: from ex vivo to in situ. It was particularly exciting to share, for the first time, a glimpse of new results from the Manka and Telling labs on prion strain fold variations within individual fibrils (hybrid folds), providing a structural basis for the long-standing concept of prion quasispecies.

Another highlight was seeing our MRes student Lenka Mrazova present her poster, A Deadly Fold, showcasing part of this work.

One of the nicest aspects of the symposium was the relaxed atmosphere and the dedicated networking session for early career researchers. Simply having time to stay after the talks, wander around the posters, catch up with old friends, meet new colleagues, and talk about science and future plans without looking at the clock.

The programme covered an impressive breadth of EM applications. The field has grown extraordinarily diverse, yet meetings like this remind us how connected the community really is.

A huge thank you to Natasha Lukoyanova for the kind invitation and for organising such a wonderful symposium, and to Emma Punch for the generous LinkedIn shoutout afterwards.

Special thanks also to the organising committee: Joe Atherton, Doryen Bubeck, Josie Ferreira, Pippa Hawes, Peter Rosenthal, and Xiaodong Zhang.