RICHARD HENDERSON

   

Richard henderson

                                               -AACHAL BURANDE

Richard Henderson, (born July 19, 1945, Edinburgh, Scotland), Scottish biophysicist and molecular biologist who was the first to successfully produce a three-dimensional image of a biological molecule at atomic resolution using a technique known as cryo-electron microscopy. Henderson’s refinement of imaging methods for cryo-electron microscopy, in which biomolecules are frozen in such a way that allows them to retain their natural shape and are then visualized with a high-resolution microscope, enabled researchers to capture images of numerous biomolecular structures that previously could not be imaged by other means. He was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (shared with biophysicists Jacques Dubochet and Joachim Frank) for his work.

In 1975, together with MRC colleague Nigel Unwin, Henderson described a preparation method using a glucose solution for sample preservation in the vacuum environment, which enabled thin sheets of cell membrane, containing thousands of proteins, to be spread across the microscope grid. The array, because of its relatively large size, increased the opportunity to collect visual information (diffraction patterns) before the sample was destroyed. 

In the years that followed, Henderson continued to address technical problems that prevented the successful generation of high-resolution images of biomolecules by electron microscopy. In 1990, he made a major breakthrough, showing that such images could be obtained with cryo-electron microscopy. By averaging numerous copies of images of a specimen, Henderson was able to obtain the atomic structure of bacteriorhodopsin—the first atomic structure of an integral membrane protein. The findings enabled researchers to gain new insight into the mechanisms by which rhodopsin proteins function. His later research focused on single particle electron microscopy and the determination of atomic structures of large noncrystalline protein assemblies. His work on single particles led to new discoveries on structural aspects of biomolecules, the fundamental structures of many of which had long been beyond the reach of traditional microscopy methods.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Henderson received numerous other awards and honours during his career. He was an elected fellow of the Royal Society (1983), a foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (1998,) and a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, London (1998). He was a recipient of the Rosenstiel Award for Distinguished Work in Basic Medical Research (1991) and the Copley Medal of the Royal Society (2016).