Microscopy & Microanalysis 2019 in Portland, Oregon


Alice Dohnalkova, Program Chair Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, Richland, WA 99352 alice.dohnalkova@pnnl.gov


Te Microscopy Society of America (MSA), the Microanaly-


sis Society (MAS), and the International Field Emission Society (IFES) cordially invite you to attend and present your research at Microscopy & Microanalysis 2019 in Portland, Oregon. As many of you who have previously visited Portland know, this city is a terrific location for our meeting: set between Mt. Hood and the Pacific Coast, Portland (PDX for short) presents a variety of attractions for everybody. Infused with the awesome Pacific Northwest mentality of environmental conservation and organic local food sourcing, you will find a lot of wonderful restaurants here, including vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free options, plus a myriad of microbrews. Don’t forget to visit famous PDX staples like Powell’s Books and the charismatic Voodoo donut shop. Portland offers tax-free shopping. If you have an extra half-day, take a winery tour in the Willamette Valley countryside or a drive to the Pacific Coast’s Cannon beach. Make sure to bring the right footwear if you’re planning to explore the great outdoors like the Columbia Gorge area with its numerous waterfalls. Besides visiting the wonderful Portland area, the main


attraction will be the M&M—and it will be memorable this year! Once again, the latest and most innovative applications and instrumentation developments will be presented by from hundreds of investigators using microscopy and microanaly- sis techniques in the biological and physical sciences. Te M&M 2019 meeting will feature close to 40 symposia cover- ing a broad range of topics, numerous educational opportuni- ties, and the microscopy outreach program, ProjectMICRO. Prior to the meeting, there will be Sunday pre-meeting short courses and two pre-meeting congresses. Te annual micros- copy exhibition again will be the largest in the world, with 120 companies from the USA and 12 other countries. Social activi- ties will include the opening reception and daily refreshments served during our popular poster sessions. Prize-winning posters will be announced each day at the end of the session. We are excited and honored to feature two Nobel Laure- ates as our plenary lecturers. Our first plenary speaker will be


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Dr. Joachim Frank, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecu- lar Biophysics and of Biological Sciences at Columbia Univer- sity, New York. He shared with Jacques Dubochet and Richard Henderson the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for “Developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high- resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution.” Dr. Frank’s major contribution to the field has been in developing mathematical and com- putational methods for processing and analyzing cryo-EM images of multiple randomly oriented molecules within a sample and compiling them into a representative 3D structure. Dr. Frank used his algorithms to generate the first 3D images of the ribosome, a large structure made of several proteins and RNA strands, which is responsible for translating RNA into proteins inside cells in all organisms. Tese algorithms, when combined with Dubochet’s method of ice-embedding, produced information on conforma- tional changes of macromolecules in their native states, enabling a deeper understanding of the way “molecular machines” func- tion in cells. Structures can now be determined of many mol- ecules that resist crystallization and hence cannot be studied by X-ray crystallography. Initially, the resolution that could be obtained was limited by the poor performance of recording media. Tis technical problem was solved seven years ago with the introduction of cameras capable of detecting single electrons. Te development of cryo-electron microscopy has revolution- ized the imaging of biomolecules and propelled biochemistry into a new era. By now, about 1,500 structures of proteins and RNA-protein complexes have been solved and entered in a pub- lic database, making an increasingly important contribution to molecular medicine and the development of drug therapies. Dr. Frank’s achievements were earlier recognized with MSA’s Dis- tinguished Biological Scientist Award in 2003.


Dr. Joachim Frank doi:10.1017/S155192951800127X www.microscopy-today.com • 2019 January


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