Many viruses have evolved specialized mechanisms to hijack the host gene expression machinery and employ cellular resources to regulate viral life cycle. They accomplish this through producing non-structural proteins that can, among other things, inhibit host protein synthesis. Participants of this course will visualize ribosomes in complex with a non-structural viral protein at high resolution.

This course provides an in-depth discussion of two main methods to determine the 3D structures of macromolecules and complexes at high resolution: X-ray crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy. Both techniques result in electron density maps that are interpreted by atomic models.