Photo credit: United States Embassy, Sweden — File:Joachim Frank.jpg (Wikimedia Commons) · CC BY 2.0
Joachim Frank
born 1940 · United States, Germany · Contemporary
Nobel Chemistry 2017
German-born American biophysicist at Columbia University who created single-particle reconstruction methods, making cryo-electron microscopy a routine structural-biology tool.
Nobel Prize work
Developed the mathematical and computational methods that turn thousands of noisy two-dimensional electron-microscope images of randomly oriented biomolecules into sharp three-dimensional structures. His single-particle analysis algorithms became the backbone of cryo-EM, which now resolves proteins and viruses at near-atomic resolution in solution.
Fields
Related topics
Cryo-EM, protein crystallography
Structural biologists infer molecular architecture from scattered electrons or X-ray diffraction, with distinct sample preparation and data-processing limits.
Atomic-resolution microscopy (AFM, STM, imaging single bonds)
How scanning probe microscopes map surfaces atom by atom and, under carefully controlled conditions, reveal molecular structure and bond contrast.