Sebastian Tacke honored with Paper of the Year Award

Innovative technical development in the field of cryo-electron tomography awarded

The scientific article “A streamlined workflow for automated cryo focused ion beam milling” (2021) by Sebastian Tacke, project group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology, has received the Paper of the Year award by the Journal of Structural Biology (Elsevier). The prize is conferred annually to exceptional young scientists, who have been first author or co-first author of a paper that appeared in JSB in the preceding three years.

In his article Sebastian Tacke describes the development of new tools to improve sample preparation in cryo-electron tomography. Cryo-ET provides detailed insights into biological samples – a cell or tissue – and thus enables the 3D structure of large macromolecules to be revealed. During Cryo-ET the samples are flash frozen, thinned to a specific thickness and then imaged using an electron microscope. Flash freezing happens at high-speed and extreme temperatures under −150 °C. These cryogenic conditions make it possible to study samples without chemical fixation or dehydration thereby preventing distortion or disruption of biological structures of the sample. However, the preparation and the handling of the samples are very complex, since the formation of crystalline ice can compromise the structural integrity of the specimen.

Sebastian Tacke and colleagues from the MPI in Dortmund developed a new glove box system, a high-vacuum cryo-transfer device and a cryo-shutter to reduce ice contamination during, handling, transfer and preparation in the complex cryo-electron tomography workflow.

“These technical improvements will help to accelerate the usage of Cryo-ET and to make this technique more accessible to more scientists worldwide”, says Tacke.

Sebastian joined the group of Stefan Raunser, Director of the Department Structural Biochemistry at the MPI in Dortmund, as a postdoc in 2018. Since 2022 he is heading the project group “Quantitative cryo-electron tomography”.His groupd focuses on developments that enable a high-throughput cryo-electron tomography workflow, needed for the quantitative characterization of the ultrastructural landscapes of different cell types.