UCSF / HHMI
Info
Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UCSF (faculty since 2006) and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator (since 2015). Made foundational contributions to single-particle cryo-EM methodology and its application to membrane protein structure determination. His laboratory, together with David Julius’s group at UCSF, determined the first near-atomic resolution cryo-EM structures of a TRP channel (TRPV1) in 2013. This work was a landmark in the “resolution revolution” that demonstrated cryo-EM could rival X-ray crystallography for small proteins.
DiffUSE relevance
Cheng is at UCSF, the same institution as Jaime Fraser (DiffUSE PI). His cryo-EM expertise represents a complementary structural technique for studying protein dynamics: where diffuse scattering captures dynamics from crystal lattice disorder, cryo-EM captures conformational heterogeneity from single particles in vitreous ice. The two approaches could be integrated for a more complete picture of conformational ensembles.
Key Relationships
- UCSF — same institution as Jaime Fraser, Willow Coyote-Maestas, Dr. Andrej Sali
- David Julius (UCSF) — TRPV1 collaboration; Julius received the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
- HHMI Investigator
- Director of the Keck Foundation Advanced Microscopy Laboratory and the W. M. Keck Foundation Center for Cryo-EM at UCSF
Sources
- Cheng Lab: https://cryoem.ucsf.edu/
- UCSF profile: https://profiles.ucsf.edu/yifan.cheng