QBI presents Abraham (Bram) Koster, a Chair and full Professor on Ultrastructural and Molecular Imaging at the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) in the Netherlands. He obtained his Ph.D. in Physics (Particle Optics, Systems and Signals) at Delft University in the Netherlands in 1989. His work on the beam-tilt measurement of defocus has become part of many electron tomography data collections systems world-wide. In 2012, he was one of the 4 founding Directors of Netherlands cryo electron microscopy center (NeCEN). His interests evolve around developing 2D and 3D imaging methods with a wide variety of electron microscopy (EM) techniques to learn about biological systems and their functioning. He has a long track record in EM method developments and is an author on more than 150 papers resulting from collaborations on a wide variety of topics.

Bram Koster was head of the Section Electron Microscopy at the LUMC between 2006 and 2021 where his group develops advanced 3D imaging techniques, cryo correlative light, electron microscopy methods (CLEM), and instrumentation. Since 2006, he has had a close collaboration at the LUMC with Prof. Eric Snijder and Dr. Montse Barcena on understanding the intracellular mechanism of RNA virus (Sars) replication. In 2019, he refocused his research more specifically on cryo electron tomography (ET) workflows with machine-learning automation approaches for in situ structural cell biology applications.

In his presentation, he will illustrate the application of 3D electron microscopy imaging methods by the studies of his group on corona virus replication organelles that were done during the past decade. This research was done in close collaboration with Dr. Montse Barcena leading to the discovery of a molecular pore within the replication organelle (Wollf et al., Science, 2020).

Talk title: Zooming in on the coronavirus replication organelle with correlative light and electron tomography methods

Host: David Agard