Jose María Salvador Carazo Garcia

I specialize in what has become to be one of the key “Revolutions” in biology in recent times: Cryogenic Electron Microscopy (cryoEM), named “Method of the Year (2015)” by the well-known Nature journal. Indeed, cryoEM is changing the way we understand how biological macromolecules work in three-dimensions and over time, opening completely new fields and opportunities in our understanding of how nano machines work at the molecular level. This cryoEM “revolution” has been made possible by new developments in instrumentation and in image processing methods and software; it is, precisely, in the area of information processing where our laboratory has excelled along the years. Indeed, we have opened whole new areas in the field, just naming as examples the successful family of Maximum Likelihood algorithms (developed in Madrid from 2007 to 2011), the very much used EMDataBank (started from the European Union “Bioimage” project that I coordinated from 1996 to 1999), or the new mathematics on SOM neural networks for very noisy images. Our current efforts focus on the areas of structural validation and flexibility analysis, two of the most demanding topics in our quest to understand at atomic detail the dynamic of large and flexible biological macromolecules. Naturally, structure is one of the ways to understand biological function, to be necessarily complemented by others, a position that explain our continued efforts in information integration, both at the level of public research and at the Corporate one (the case of the startup Integromics). All our new developments are first published and then compiled and distributed as public software suites, becoming some of the tools that we use in our role as the Image Processing Center of the European Infrastructure for Structural Biology (Instruct ERIC –for European Research Infrastructure Consortium-)