Frozen in action: a Tokyo team photographs the enzyme that builds a cancer drug's core

Some medicines are so intricately built that chemists struggle to copy what nature does easily. A team led by Ryo Tanifuji and Hiroki Oguri of the University of Tokyo and Yoshikazu Tanaka of Tohoku University has used cryo-electron microscopy — flash-freezing molecules and imaging them — to see SacC, a bacterial enzyme that builds in a single pass the five-ring core shared by the natural compound safracin B and the sarcoma drug trabectedin. Published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the near-atomic picture was made possible by a small partner protein that stopped the enzyme clumping together. Knowing exactly how SacC works could help scientists borrow its tricks to make complex medicines more easily.

SDG 9 · Industry, innovation and infrastructure — Mechanism: tech innovation