Recent advances have pushed the boundaries of structural biology, enabling the in situ structure determination of large protein complexes within their native cellular environments. Cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) bridges the gap to the cellular mesoscale by providing structural information for organelles and entire cells.

In this Cell Symposium, we want to highlight recent breakthroughs in the structure determination of physiological important proteins and macromolecular complexes both from isolated samples and in a cellular context as well as virus structures that were obtained using different techniques including cryo-electron microscopy, cryo-ET, X-ray crystallography, NMR, and computational approaches within the framework of integrative structural biology. We will also discuss the functional insights gained from these structures and methodological advances that enabled these studies. We hope to bring together structural biologists from different disciplines and interested scientists to discuss exciting new findings and conceptual advances in this field.

Topics:

• Recent structures of membrane proteins and macromolecular machines
• Advances in structural virology
• Structural immunology, host-pathogen interactions
• in situ structural biology