Aaron Klug and the revolution in biomolecular structure determination

Aaron Klug's group was one of the first to use a combination of X-ray diffraction and electron microscopy to study the structures of macromolecules. He helped to provide the intellectual framework for understanding the self-assembly of regular viruses and developed methods for analyzing their three-dimensional structures from electron microscope images, as well as the structures of helical polymers. He and his coworkers established the basic features of chromatin organization, including the structure of the repeating units (nucleosomes) and how they are stacked together. He studied a variety of molecules that interact with DNA or RNA, including disks of tobacco mosaic virus protein, a tRNA and a ribozyme, and also discovered the zinc-finger motif in nucleic acid-binding proteins. Thus, he has played a major part in developing the ideas and techniques that established structural molecular biology as an exciting new science during the second half of the twentieth century.