Over the past decade, the phrase ‘cryo-electron microscopy’,often abbreviated as ‘cryo-EM’, has evolved toencompass a broad range of experimental methods. At he core, each of these is based upon the principle of imaging radiation-sensitive specimens in a transmission electron microscope under cryogenic conditions. In biology, applications of cryo-EM now cover a wide spectrum, ranging from imaging intact tissue sections and plunge-frozen cells to imaging individual bacteria, viruses and protein molecules. Cryo-electron tomography,single-particle cryo-electron microscopy and electron
crystallography are all sub-disciplines of cryo-EM that have been used successfully to analyze biological structures in various contexts. These methods have been used singly as well as in hybrid approaches, in which the information obtained from electron microscopy is combined with complementary information obtained using X-ray crystallographic and NMR spectroscopic approaches.
https://febs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/febs.12078
