The Living Lab: Navigating into cells

How do viruses attach to cells? How do proteins interact and mediate infection? How do molecular machines organize themselves in healthy cells? How do they differ in diseased cells? These are the types of questions National Institutes of Health researchers ask in the recently established Living Lab for Structural Biology, questions they strive to answer through the most sophisticated of imaging techniques.

The Living Lab is an innovative partnership between NIH and FEI, an Oregon-based instrumentation company that manufactures advanced microscopes. FEI brings to the table invaluable assistance in developing and customizing electron microscopes for biological applications. Using that cutting edge technology, scientists in the Living Lab, unencumbered by any pressure to patent or otherwise protect discoveries for commercial purposes, can proceed purely driven by scientific and biomedical puzzles. Success of the Living Lab, which is on the NIH campus in Bethesda, Md., will rest on that collaboration between the government and the private sector—and the idea that answering scientific questions and technical advancement go hand in hand.

“We want to navigate our way into cells and into viruses,” said Sriram Subramaniam, Ph. D., director of the NIH component of the Living Lab. “We would like to be able to describe the function of complex things, such as whole cells or infectious viruses, in terms of their molecular make-up, and try to figure out how they work.”

The Living Lab’s advanced imaging technology allows researchers to tackle previously unanswered questions in structural biology by creating three-dimensional shapes of various molecular machines. Visualizing tiny details is a step toward understanding the molecular origins of disease. “The prospects for studying structures of a broad spectrum of medically relevant complexes at minute resolutions has changed dramatically in recent years with advances in structural biology,” said Subramaniam. “Our goal with the Living Lab is to capture the synergy between all of these methods including the latest advances in cryo-electron microscopy to extend these advances to key scientific challenges in modern structural biology.”

Subramaniam, who earned his doctorate at Stanford University and did post-doctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in chemistry and biology, directs the research activities of the Living Lab, in close consultation with other team members from FEI and from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.