Many thanks to Professor Rami Karam Aziz (Head of the Research Laboratories in Life Sciences – MARC Research Center) for providing the opportunity to train two of the SOP TAs (Noha Mustafa Abdelhamid and Yara Ahmed Zaki) by participating in the training workshop titled “Hands-on Structural Biology, Crystallography, and Cryo-EM Data Analysis” held at the MARC Research Center in 6th of October City from Wednesday to Tuesday, September 10 to 16, 2025, especially considering that the available opportunities were extremely limited (a total of only 6 seats).
The workshop was presented by a Japanese-Egyptian team who have formed an alliance to promote the use of the Croy electron microscopy technology (which was recognized by a Nobel prize in 2017) for protein structure determination. The team consisted of 9 Japanese scientists, led by Professor Yoshikazu Tanaka (from Tohoku University in Japan), and 3 Egyptian scientists from the Faculty of Pharmacy, Cairo University, led by Dr. Noha M Elhosseiny.
The five-day workshop included various scientific activities:
- Part I: Cryo-EM tutorials and hands-on crystallization (wet lab) – September 10-11
- Part II: Symposium on Cryo-EM and other structural & molecular biological applications – September 14, followed by Hands-on computational training on using CryoSPARC and COOT for 3D structure elucidation of macromolecules – September 15-16
