This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

A tiny disk is used to hold a protein sample for UT Health San Antonio's new cryo-electron microscopy instrument. The school is investing $5M over the next three years in the technology which can capture images of elusive proteins which are a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair.

Elizabeth Wasmuth (left), assistant professor of biochemistry and structural biology and Lijia Jia, facility director stand next to the control room of UT Health San Antonio’s new cryo-EM lab. The school is investing $5M over the next three years in the technology called cryo-electron microscopy, which can capture images of elusive proteins which are a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair.

Elizabeth Wasmuth (right), assistant professor of biochemistry and structural biology and Lijia Jia, facility director, discuss UT Health San Antonio’s new cryo-EM lab.

Lijia Jia, Ph.D, cryo-EM facility director, discusses the technique of capturing images of proteins in UT Health San Antonio’s new cryo-EM lab. The school is investing $5M over the next three years in the technology called cryo-electron microscopy, which can capture images of elusive proteins which are a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair.

Lijia Jia, Ph.D, Cryo-EM facility director, shows the internals of UT Health San Antonio’s new cryo-EM instrument. The school is investing $5M over the next three years in the technology called cryo-electron microscopy, which can capture images of elusive proteins which are a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair.

In a basement under UT Health San Antonio’s Holly Auditorium sits a new multi-million-dollar instrument — one that allows researchers to see molecular proteins a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair.

“Or like being able to see a dime on the surface of the moon,” said Elizabeth Wasmuth, a newly recruited assistant professor of biochemistry and structural biology at the academic institution.

It’s the only cryo-electron microscope of its kind in South Texas, according to Shaun Olsen, director of structural biology cores at UT Health San Antonio. And there are already plans to bring in another cryo-EM.

Olsen said their team is using the technology to help study diseases — such as diabetes, obesity and dementia — that disproportionately affect people in San Antonio and throughout South Texas.

“Because there are a lot of patients with those diseases here, we envision gaining insights from physicians that can help us determine structures to help solve the clinical problems they are seeing and the biological questions that they need answered,” Olsen said. “The ultimate goal is to help patients. We want to understand things to make drugs and better serve humanity.”

Olsen developed the business model for the 1,600-square-feet facility in 2020 after getting a $4 million Rising Star award from the state-funded cancer agency to join the faculty at the school’s Long School of Medicine.

UT Health ordered the $5 million system in December 2020. The manufacturer spent a year building it. It was shipped around Thanksgiving 2021 and installed over the summer.

On ExpressNews.com: UT Health San Antonio snags $11 million to fight cancer

The cryo-EM shoots an electron gun at the speed of light through flash-frozen samples on a tiny gold “grid.” At the same time, a special camera captures terabytes of movies and images, which are uploaded into a powerful computer with software that can build a detailed three-dimensional rendering.

This major scientific breakthrough came about only recently. In 2017, Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing cryo-electron microscopy.

Wasmuth says it’s already transforming their research by allowing them to see the molecules inside cells, including those that had always been too “wiggly” to be visualized by older methods.

“So it’s a numbers game, essentially. But only this configuration could get us these structural representations,” she said, pointing out how the computers find dozens of similar high-resolution images and layer them.

Sifting this amount of data requires graphic cards, which are in short supply because of cryptocurrency.

“This is like mining bitcoins,” she said. “It’s a lot of power.”

Wasmuth was recruited to the medical school from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City through a $2 million grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, or CPRIT.

Her research is in understanding prostate cancer, but since the cryo-EM was installed a month ago, it has been used for projects studying cancerous tumors, observing drug targets and a treatment for COVID-19.

Wasmuth helped bring in scientist Lijia Jia, who has been specially trained on cryo-EMs and has a knack for getting really good samples and precisely aligning the microscope for target acquisition.

In order to get a good sample, Jia must flash-freeze proteins with liquid ethane so that they are suspended in a thin layer of ice. He then carefully puts four “grids” onto a disk, and a robotic arm takes them into the machine.

This particular cryo-EM configuration is unique because of an advanced filter that was added to eliminate some of the background noise in the suspension fluid. This makes for much clearer images, he said.

“Once we do our analysis, we can see where drugs find the different contacts, and we can rationalize that to make more effective drugs in the future,” Wasmuth said.

On ExpressNews.com: San Antonio medical school gets millions to research breast cancer

The team is currently working on five projects creating these 3D renderings, including one for an investigator at the University of Texas at San Antonio and another for DNA repair expert Patrick Sung, who was an early funder.

Sung was among the first to understand the roles of BRCA1 and 2, hereditary genes that suppress breast and ovarian cancers. He came to UT Health San Antonio because of a CPRIT grant in 2019 and now directs the school’s Greehey Children’s Cancer Research Institute.

Wasmuth pointed to an image of a drug Sung is researching.

“I probably can’t talk about it, but I can say that there are already things happening as a result of the information we’ve gotten on this microscope here.”

Laura Garcia is a reporter at the San Antonio Express-News focused on health care. Previously, the South Texas native was the features editor and nonprofits reporter at the Victoria Advocate. She is president of the San Antonio Association of Hispanic Journalists, which gives scholarships to communications students and advocates for diversity in news.