Wah Chiu, Ph.D.
Alvin Romansky Professor, Departments of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, Molecular and Cellular Biology, Molecular Physiology & Biophysics, Molecular Virology & Microbiology
Director, National Center for Macromolecular Imaging
Director, Protein Folding Center
Codirector, W. M. Keck Center for Computational Biology
National Center for Macromolecular Imaging
Center for Protein Folding Machinery
Education and Awards
- Ph.D., Biophysics, 1975, University of California, Berkeley
- Postdoctoral, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Berkeley, California
- Guggenheim Fellow, 1986
- Alexander von Humboldt Fellow, 1996
Electron Cryo-Microscopy of Biological Nanomachines
Our research interests are to determine 3-dimensional structures of biological nanomachines by electron cryomicroscopy and computer reconstruction and to relate the structures to their functional mechanisms. Our structural technique complements to those of X ray crystallography and NMR spectroscopy. Our laboratory is uniquely equipped with four intermediate voltage electron cryomicroscopes and supercomputer.
Our laboratory has pioneered various experimental and computational methods in biological cryo-EM. We have determined cryo-EM structures of biological bundle, ion channel, viruses and chaperonins at unprecedented resolutions. Our group has recently achieved the capability of tracing Ca backbone of protein components in several large molecular nanomachines using single particle cryo-EM without the aid of crystallography. Many of our structural investigations have produced not only novel structural informatics but also insightful functional mechanisms on protein folding and virus infection respectively.
Liu. X., Jiang, W., Jakana, J. and Chiu, W., (2007). Averaging tens to hundreds of icosahedral particle images to resolve protein secondary structure elements using a multi-path simulated annealing optimization algorithm. J Struct Biol 160:11-27.
Booth, C.R., Meyer, A.S., Cong, Y., Topf, M., Sali, A., Ludtke, S.J., Chiu, W., and Frydman, J. (2008). Mechanism of lid closure in the eukaryotic chaperonin TRiC/CCT. Nature Struct Mol Biol 15: 746-753
Ludtke, S.J., Baker, M.L., Chen, D.H., Song, J. L., Chuang, D.T., and Chiu, W. (2008) De Novo Backbone trace of GroEL from single particle electron cryomicroscopy. Structure 16: 441-448.
Serysheva, I.I., Ludtke, S.J., Baker, M.L., Cong, Y., Topf. M., Eramian, D., Sali, A., Hamilton, S. L., and Chiu, W., (2008). Subnanometer-resolution electron cryomicroscopy-based domain models for the cytoplasmic region of skeletal muscle RyR channel. Prod Natl Acad Sci U.S.A. 205: 9610-9615.
Jiang, W., Baker, M.L., Jakana, J., Weigela, P. R., King, J., and Chiu, W., (2008). Backbone structure of the infectious epsilon15 virus capsid revealed by electron cryomicroscopy. Nature 451: 1130-1134.