Richard Henderson awarded a Nobel Prize in chemistry

Dr. Richard Henderson is awarded with the Nobel Prize form the Royal Swedish Academy for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution. The SBU wants to congratule Dr. Henderson and to thank him about his participation as opening speaker to the conference about methods and applications in the frontier of MX and CryoEM held in Barcelona on September. It

Richard Henderson is a molecular biologist and biophysicist pioneer in the field of electron microscopy of biological molecules. He obtained his PhD at Cambridge University on 1969. In 1990, Henderson published the atomic model of bacteriorhodopsin by electron crystallography in the Journal of Molecular Biology. This model was the second ever atomic model of a membrane protein. The techniques Henderson developed for crystallography are still in use. More recently, Dr. Henderson has devoted his attention to single particle electron microscopy: he was an early proponent of the idea that single particle EM is capable of determining atomic resolution models for proteins, explained in a 1995 paper in Quarterly Reviews of Biophysics. He made seminal contributions to many of the approaches used in single particle EM, including pioneering the development of direct electron detectors that recently allowed single particle cryo-EM to achieve this goal.