…for large, fragile, or flexible structures (such as membrane protein complexes) that are difficult to prepare yet hold the key to central biomedical questions, the new technology is a major breakthrough. In the future, it may no longer be necessary to crystallize large, well-defined complexes such as ribosomes. Instead, their structures can be determined elegantly and quickly by cryo-EM.

The ability to recover multiple structures, or even a continuum of structures, from a single sample sets off cryo-EM sharply from X-ray crystallography, and promises to give us very detailed information
on molecular mechanisms of ligand binding, allosteric switching, and gating events.