Aaron Klug

Aaron Klug (1926–2018) was a Lithuanian-born British chemist who developed crystallographic electron microscopy and received the 1982 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Rosalind Franklin: Rosalind Franklin was a British chemist whose X-ray diffraction studies advanced the understanding of DNA and viruses. Franklin’s virus research at Birkbeck shaped the structural problems Klug later tackled.
Crystallographic electron microscopy: Crystallographic electron microscopy reconstructs three-dimensional molecular structure by combining electron micrographs with diffraction-based methods. Klug developed this approach to extract structural information from imperfect biological crystals.
Virus structure: Virus structure describes the organization of viral genomes, protein shells, and any surrounding membranes. Virus particles provided Klug with prominent examples of repeating, symmetry-rich molecular architecture.
University of Cape Town: The University of Cape Town is a public research university in Cape Town, South Africa. Klug studied chemistry and physics there before pursuing crystallographic research.
Structural biology: Structural biology studies the molecular shapes and arrangements that underlie biological function. Klug’s methods expanded the experimental toolkit for determining biological structures.
Francis Crick: Francis Crick was a British molecular biologist who helped discover the double-helical structure of DNA. Crick’s structural reasoning influenced Klug’s approach to interpreting biological images.
Electron microscopy: Electron microscopy uses beams of electrons to form images at scales smaller than those accessible to visible-light microscopes. Klug adapted electron imaging to determine biological structures quantitatively.
Icosahedral virus: An icosahedral virus has a protein shell organized with the rotational symmetry of an icosahedron. Klug used symmetry to interpret electron-microscope images of these large viral shells.
University of Cambridge: The University of Cambridge is a research university in Cambridge, England, founded in 1209. Klug completed doctoral research in crystallography at Cambridge.
Cryogenic electron microscopy: Cryogenic electron microscopy images rapidly frozen specimens to determine molecular structures while limiting radiation damage. It became a powerful later route to structures that Klug’s crystallographic methods helped make imaginable.

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