[Borek]

https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2017/press.html

4 October 2017

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2017 to

Jacques Dubochet
University of Lausanne, Switzerland

Joachim Frank
Columbia University, New York, USA

and

Richard Henderson
MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK

"for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution"

[Yggdrasil]

I dunno about you but my freezer is definitely not cryogenic (cryo EM is typically done under LN2 at 100K or liquid helium at 4K).

Definitely a well deserved prize.  The technique is revolutionizing structural biology and it is already capable of matching x-ray crystallography and solving the structures of molecules that have eluded crystallographers (e.g. the TRPV1 channel).

[Borek]

I dunno about you but my freezer is definitely not cryogenic (cryo EM is typically done under LN2 at 100K or liquid helium at 4K).

I didn't mean it to be THAT literal

Definitely a well deserved prize.  The technique is revolutionizing structural biology and it is already capable of matching x-ray crystallography and solving the structures of molecules that have eluded crystallographers (e.g. the TRPV1 channel).

Yes. The way I see it it is one of these techniques that SciFi authors used to write about 100 or even 50 years ago, now they are a reality.

[Irlanur]

The technique definitely deserves the prize. But it's also one of these Nobel prizes where so many more would deserve it, too.

[Babcock_Hall]

I agree that this prize is deserved.  I do think that structural biology is a little over-represented and I wish that mechanistic enzymology would garner more attention than it has.

[wildfyr]

I wish click chemistry would, it has bled all over the place in science. Chemistry, biology, materials sci. Maybe its being held back by the fact that Sharpless already has a Nobel for his epoxide work.

[P]

I think the Physics one was well deserved also for the Gravity Wave discovery....  totally fascinating!

[Yggdrasil]

I agree that this prize is deserved.  I do think that structural biology is a little over-represented and I wish that mechanistic enzymology would garner more attention than it has.

Isn't structural biology a main method for studying enzyme mechanisms?  One could also consider Jennifer Doudna a mechanistic enzymologist, and many think she will win soon for her work on CRISPR-Cas9.

[Babcock_Hall]

Yes structural biology is one method, but there is some tension between people who are mechanistic versus structural enzymologists.  IIRC Jeremy Knowles once said words to the effect that studying an enzyme by looking at a crystal structure was like trying to pick the next Kentucky Derby winner on the basis of photographs of the horses.

[Yggdrasil]

What are some discoveries from mechanistic enzymology that you feel would warrant the prize?  CRISPR-Cas9 comes to mind as something where mechanistic enzymology led to being able to use that system for gene editing.  Horwich and Hartl's work on the mechanisms of chaperone proteins would also stand out as worthy of a Nobel, though these are not really conventional enzymes.

[Babcock_Hall]

That is not an easy question.  Let me say at the outset that maybe none of them do, in the sense of having broad applicability.  However, the use of kinetic isotopes to study the transition-states of enzyme-catalyzed reactions is pretty amazing, and sometimes these isotope effects are used to aid in inhibitor design (the work of Vern Schramm comes to mind).  Some of the best enzymologists of the twentieth century (Frank Westheimer, William P. Jencks, and Robert Abeles, for example) worked on many problems, and although their contributions were large, they were spread out.
EDT
The notion that enzymes could work by radical mechanisms was also a conceptual breakthrough, IMO.  Ribonucleotide reductase is a good example.