“Visualizing Molecular Machines in Motion through Cryo-EM, Cryo-ET, and Deep Learning”
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Date and Time
9:30 AM – 11:00 AM Tuesday, July 28, 2026
Location
Online (Zoom)
Speaker
Dr. Joseph H. Davis, PhD
Whitehead Associate Professor of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), US. Associate Member, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, US
Abstract
Macromolecular machines undergo massive compositional and conformational rearrangements during their lifecycles to maintain cellular homeostasis. While cryo-EM and cryo-ET have revolutionized our ability to determine these structures, reconstructing highly heterogeneous ensembles and continuous trajectories of molecular motion directly from raw, low-signal experimental data remains a formidable biochemical and computational challenge. In this talk, I will describe our lab’s ongoing efforts to bridge the gap between experimental structural biology and advanced machine learning to resolve these complex structural landscapes. First, I will present cryoPRISM (purification-free ribosome imaging from subcellular mixtures), a rapid ex vivo workflow that bypasses extensive biochemical purification to capture biological complexes in near-native environments. Second, I will discuss our development of deep learning architectures, such as cryoDRGN and its extension tomoDRGN, which leverage variational autoencoders (VAEs) to map single-particle images or sub-tomograms to continuous, low-dimensional latent spaces. These computational tools enable the unsupervised reconstruction of continuous conformational changes and compositional heterogeneity directly from low-signal-to-noise datasets, paving the way for a deeper, quantitative understanding of cellular machinery in action.
Profile
2024–Present: Whitehead Associate Professor of Biology, MIT & Associate Member, Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard
2017–2024: Assistant Professor of Biology, MIT
2012–2017: Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellow and NIH K99 Fellow, the Scripps Research Institute
2010–2012: Senior Scientist and First Employee, Ginkgo BioWorks
2005–2010: Ph.D. in Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2000–2003: B.S. in Biological Engineering and B.A. in Computer Science, Univ. of California, Berkeley