Question: I asked lewis and he told me to ask you this question, it was what do enzymes look like under a microscope)

Ian Hands-Portman answered on 17 Mar 2014:

I’ll see if I can find some pics to put on my profile but I’m not on my usual computer at the moment.

Most of them are just blobs that are really hard to interpret. The shape of the enzyme is what controls its function and that’s part of what we’re trying to understand. We can’t just look at one picture though

If you image getting a bag of jelly babies – all one colour to keep it easy.

Throw them all in the air over a table and watch them land – that’s like putting a sample of an enzyme under my microscopes.

Now photograph just one where it’s landed.

With one photograph you’ve just got a single view – if you’re lucky it’s face up so you can see the important bits but you can’t tell what a whole jelly baby would look like from the one picture.

To get a proper view you need to take as many photos as possible – some will be on their side, some face down, a very very few might be standing up.

Now you have whole load of photographs which is great but not very helpful. If you load all the photographs into a computer you can ask a program to sort them all out into piles of the different views then take each pile and make an average picture of that pile. By comparing all the average photos you can work out which one fits where and finally build a model of your jelly baby in 3d.

This doesn’t answer your question but I’m getting there. I’ll use someone else’s work as it’s a far nicer example – ATPase is an essential energy handling enzyme and one of the best examples of using a microscope to look at an enzyme –

http://www.pnas.org/content/107/4/1367/F1.expansion.html

This picture has 4 views as you’d see them in the microscope and the 3d model that’s our ultimate goal – it took nearly 20,000 images to make this model!