Aminoff Prize awarded

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the Gregori Aminoff prize in crystallography for 1999 to Dr. Richard Henderson and Dr. Nigel Unwin, MRC Lab of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, England, for their development of methods for structure determination of biological macromolecules using electron diffraction. The prize was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Academy, March 31, 1999. A symposium entitled Structure Determination of Macromolecules with Electron Diffraction was held March 29-30 to honor the prizewinners. The symposium was supported by the Academy through its Nobel Inst. for Chemistry.

Lectures were given by the following invited speakers: R. Henderson (Atomic Resolution Electron Microscopy in Biology), N. Unwin (The Acetylcholin Receptor Channel - Approaching Atomic Resolution), H. Cheng (Virus Studies, Essence of Supermolecular Symmetry), H. Herbert (Electron Crystallography of Membrane-bound Enzymes), M. van Heel (Structure and Function of the Ribosome by 3d Cryo-EM), S. Hovmöller (Imaging Individual Atoms by Electron Microscopy), S. Iwata (Structural Studies on the Cytochrome bc1 Complex), W. Kühlbrandt (Making Light Work - The Membrane Proteins of Plant Photosynthesis), M. Rossmann (Where Electron Microscopy Meets with Crystallography), M. Saraste (Different Methods for the Study of Membrane Structures), U. Skoglund (Visualization of Single Protein Molecules by Electron Tomography).

Ivar Olovsson, Chairman, Swedish National Committee of Crystallography