Video of the Week: Making the invisible visible - Cryo-electron microscopy

Thanks to cryo-electron microscopy, we can now see the world at 1 million times magnification, which makes a single human hair as wide as a football pitch. Professor Peijun Zhang is a structural biologist and a world leader in using a cutting-edge technique cryo-electron microscopy. She is a Wellcome Investigator and the Director of a National cryo-electron microscopy facility, the Electron Bio-Imaging Centre (eBIC), at Diamond Light Source. Peijun and her team have been able to reveal the structure of one fundamental part of HIV – the capsid.

This work may give us a new target in the fight against HIV drug resistance, helping people like Dr Doug Fink. He’s a Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Training Fellow and is completing a PhD into HIV interactions with the immune system in the Towers lab at University College London. He is also an infectious diseases doctor who has managed the treatment of people living with HIV in London and in sub-Saharan Africa.

Making the invisible visible - Cryo-electron microscopy